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Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2010 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/nodynastyinnorthOOfern 



No Dynasty in North America. 



THE WEST BETWEEN SALT WATERS. 

HUDSON BAY A FREE BASIN LIKE THE &ULF OF fflEXICO. 

HUDSON STKATT A FREE GATE LIKE THE 
STRAIT OF FLORIDA. 

MANITOBA LIKE LOUISIANA A MARITIME STATE. 
NORTH AMERICA FOR CITIZENS, NOT FOR SUBJECTS. 

THE WEST AND ITS WAYS OUT TO THE COAST 
AND IN FROM THE OCEAN. 

MISCELLANY. 



BY 

THOMAS S. FEEJ^OK 



FOR SALE AT 

BRENTANO'S LITERARY EMPORIUM, 

89 Union Square, New York. 



PRICE, FIFTY CENTS. 



No Dynasty in North America. 



THE WEST BETWEEN SALT WATERS. 

HUDSON BAY A FREE BASIN LIKE THE &DLF OF MEXICO. 

HUDSON STRAIT A FREE GATE LIKE THE 
STRAIT OF FLORIDA. 

MANITOBA LIKE LOUISIANA A MARITIME STATE. 
NORTH AMERICA FOR CITIZENS, NOT FOR SUBJECTS. 

THE WEST AND ITS WAYS OUT TO THE COAST 
AND IN FROM THE OCEAN. 

MISCELLANY. 



THOMAS S. FERl^OK 



PHILADELPHIA: 
PRESS OF HENRY B. ASH MEAD, 

Nos. 1102 AND 1104 Sansom Street. 
1878. 






Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by 

THOMAS S. FERNON, 
In the oiSce of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 






4 



^^' 



t 



/\ 



NO DYNASTY TN NORTH AMERICA. 



CHAPTER I. 

The atlas of the world contains no political outline so " ragged 
edged" as the Dominion of Canada, made up of misallied provinces 
in single file like Indians on a trail, nowhere two abreast ; and of which 
it may be said, could the autonomic wonder be described, that Mani- 
toba is its chest, with one lung thawed in the grain-growing summer 
solstice, the other lung blockaded with ice throughout the year ; its 
waist the wasp girth of ground between Lake Superior and James 
Bay ; Nova Scotia its heel ; and Newfoundland the big toe of its 
"best foot put foremost" among the fishes. 

The Dominion of Canada was organized contemporaneously with 
the military adventure of Napoleon the Third in Mexico, during the 
rebellion of the Potomac Rio-Grande States, 1861-65, in expectation 
that secession would succeed and the American Union be dissolved. 
To profit from this disaster France and Great Britain made mutual 
preparations. But the "wayward sisters" that loved secession "not 
wisely but too well," when they went out at the side doors open 
south, are reinstalled in their old places and duties under the invin- 
cible Constitution, which, to preserve liberty in the Republic and union 
among the States, can take shape to meet necessities, can carry guns 
like a ship and be reefed and unfurled like a sail, to suit the weather 
of the times ; and the prodigal sons of secession, willing to serve the 
country, break bread in Washington and divide appropriations in 
Congress with representatives of the States that continued steadfast ; 
and so the four quarters of the country, named after the cardinal 
points, are all cemented in the joints dovetailed in the Union shield, 
and every State is a standard star on the national flag. 

The American citizen is always and everywhere gladdened by the 
ensign of his nationality ; and the subject in political fetters is cheered 
by the stars and stripes, radiant in the ports of the world penetrated 
by American ships, with colors at the mast-head, free in the wind and 
bright against the heavens, the banner an inspiration, the background 
the resting place for hope. What a contrast between freedom and 



despotism ! What a transition from bondage of the mind to liberty 
of speech and action ! Through its flag the American Union is visible, 
as through the firmament the universe is comprehensible; and the 
harmony among the States that move in the Union is identical with 
the harmony among the orbs that move in space. Lift up your 
thoughts, oh ye politicians in Congress, and look over North America, 
ye rulers in Washington ! 

Beyond the Rio Grande neighbor Mexico is an independent Repub- 
lic ; whereas the Dominion north of a boundary line of many crooks 
and few tangents, though cradled in "great expectations," an empire 
in embryo, for a Prince of the House of Hanover, or some one of its 
choosing, is. uncultivable for cereal and fibrous crops in two-thirds or 
more of its superficial square miles. 

" Only partially thawed in summer," says the geographical chart, 
on the polar side of a climate line through the British Possessions ; 
and white-bear, reindeer, and walrus, says the same chart, above a 
climate line described as the " northern limit of barley and trees," 
which crosses Slave Lake and intersects Hudson Bay near the mouth 
of Nelson River. 

The arctic highlands and islands and the icy seas and sounds 
between Alaska and Baffin Bay, and from the sixtieth parallel to the 
pole, may be considered British territory to expand the circumference 
of empire, and perhaps commend the Dominion to adventurous trap- 
pers, sanguine fur traders, and rash navigators in search of the 
magnetic point and the northwest passage ; but for governmental 
purposes these considerations are of minimum account, even though 
the Esquimaux be assessed as tributers for mining for fishes in fissures 
in the ice. 

And Europeans, when they compare localities in high latitudes in 
North America with localities on corresponding lines in their own 
country, ought always credit their milder home climate to the Gulf 
Stream which passes a tepid river between banks of colder water from 
the Florida Strait to the British islands, and via the North Sea to 
Norway ; whilst the arctic current, with Greenland's icebergs adrift 
in its waters, cold almost to the freezing point, prolongs the embargo 
of winter in the St. Lawrence, and defers the opening of navigation 
to Quebec and Montreal till more than half the season of spring, 
always a busy time, is past and gone. 

Moreover, it is wicked, because it is deception, to inscribe on a map 
of the Dominion of Canada "latitude of London 50° 30'" athwart 
Lake Winnipeg, where in midwinter the mercury sinks to fifty degrees 
below zero, and has been cast into balls in bullet moulds, for ocular 
demonstration. 



True, there are prairie bottoms, upland terraces, and little and large 
oases in the Winnipeg basin, between the international boundary fence 
and the isothermal limit to agriculture. And the Dominion govern" 
ment, with the proceeds of loans negotiated in the "mother country," 
is traversing Dominion territory with the Canada Pacific Railway 
through twenty-seven hundred (2700) miles of wilderness, from Mont- 
real via Ottawa, Serlick, and Yellow Head Pass, to the Pacific waters. 
But it is, nevertheless, a fact disparaging to the Dominion that, of 
the Europeans who first land in Canada, many soon push on through 
it into the States; so an emigrant via the Dominion is an immigrant 
in the Union, and hence, notwithstanding that Quebec was founded 
in 1608, and is older than New York city, and Serlick in Manitoba 
was settled fifty years before Minnesota, New York city to-day con- 
tains as many inhabitants as twenty Quebecs, whereas the white 
population in Minnesota is more than thirty-six times the white and 
half-breed population of Manitoba. New York State contains a larger 
population than the whole Dominion of Canada, although Jacques 
Cartier, a French navigator, sailed up the St. Lawrence in 1535, and 
it was not till 1609 that Hendrick Hudson, in the Dutch service, 
entered the waters of New Y^ork Bay. 

In British Columbia gold was discovered in 1858, twenty years 
ago ; but Washington Territory, on the Union side of the temporary 
boundary fence, and which never allured gold-hunters, contains more 
than twice the population of its British neighbor. Why ? Because 
one is part of the American Republic, the other is a dependency of 
a foreign kingdom. In one place the man is a citizen, where patent- 
rights are restricted to discoveries and inventions in the sciences and 
arts ; the other is a subject who owes allegiance to a far-away dynasty, 
where titles are inheritable and society is portioned into castes, as 
railway freight is portioned into classes. Witness : 





Square Miles. 


Census. 


White Population, 


Washington Territory, 


69,994 


1870 


22,195 


British Columbia, 


213,000 


1871 


10,586 



The Hudson Bay Company's charter, dated May 2, 1670, expired 
in 1859. Lord Serlick obtained a grant of land on Red River in 
1811, and in 1816 he arrived at his colony with a military escort. 

In 1816 the site of Chicago was in the Northwest Territory, and 
the Missouri Territory west of the Mississippi River was bounded on 
the south by the State of Louisiana, and on the north by British 
America. Indiana was the frontier State, admitted into the Union 
December 11, 1816. When, therefore, Lord Serlick visited his set- 
tlement on Red River, in 1816, via Hudson Bay and the portages 



6 

between "York Factory" and Serlick, Union domain was wilderness 
west of Lake Michigan : for Minnesota was not organized as a Terri- 
tory till March 3, 1849, and was not admitted as a State till 
February 26, 1857. 

Compai'isun. Square Miles. Census. Population. 

Minnesota, 83,531 1870 438,257 

Manitoba, 2,891,734 1871 11,963 

The population at the settlements on Red River and the Assini- 
boin in 1843 was 5143. 

In Minnesota the whites only are counted; in Manitoba, census of 
1871, the half-breeds are included with the whites. 

At the time of Lord Serlick's visit to Red River in 1816, there 
Avere only eighteen States in the Union, all east of Lake Michigan 
and the main Mississippi River, except Louisiana ; whereas now 
there are in the Union thirty-eight States, and eleven Territories, 
containing more than eleven embryo States. 

There will be sixty millions of inhabitants in the Union before 
there will be five millions of inhabitants in the Dominion ; for, in the 
ten years ending 1871, the Provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Bruns- 
wick, and Nova Scotia increased only 395,265, whereas, in the ten 
years ending in 1870, the State of Pennsylvania increased 595,941, 
and the Union, notwithstanding four years of sanguinary civil war, 
increased 7,075,877, which is more than twice the total of Dominion 
population. 

Here is what Minnesota, Manitoba's neighbor, has done in the way 
of growth and increase : 

Population, 1840. 1850. 1860. 1870. 

Minnesota, 6.077 172,0-3 438,257 

Manitoba, in 1871, contained of whites and half-breeds 11,963. 
This, indeed, is a contrast in increase, in considering which it is 
well to remember that the French fur traders had penetrated into the 
Red River region from Hudson Bay, and also from Lake Superior, 
more than a hundred years anterior to Lord Serlick's visit in 1816. 
Fort Bourbon, now York Fort, was built by the French, who held it 
from 1697 to 1714, when possession was surrendered to the English. 
Manitoba, therefore, cannot urge insulation as a cause of its small 
population, because its two routes with portages gave it as good 
communications to the seaboard as were available across the Allegheny 
Mountain to the Ohio River, prior to the opening of the Baltimore 
and Ohio Railroad to Wheeling, 11th January, 1853, and the Penn- 
sylvania Railroad to Pittsburgh, 14th February, 1854. Ohio con- 



tainerl over two millions of population before a railway track crossed 
its boundary line. "The star of empire westward took its way" at 
a very early day across Pennsylvania and Virginia, and the frontier 
State was on the west bank of the Mississippi River, opposite the 
mouth of the Ohio River, before the railway was in public use even 
in England, the land of its invention and first construction. No, no, 
it is as a State that Manitoba may more reasonably expect to attract 
immigration, for the stranger from afar would then find within it the 
"liberty, equality, and fraternity" which he crossed the ocean to 
enjoy, in personal experiences and domestic comforts. 

There are no flanged family shoes worn in the Union to keep the 
son on the father's track, like a car with flanged wheels coupled to a 
car ahead, for here man is free to make a self-propelling motor of his 
brain power; whereas to move a train, or even a car, a steam engine 
is a necessity. Self-reliance in mundane matters is the American 
mental characteristic, and the observant alien plants his boy in Amer- 
ican ground to grow an American citizen and enjoy freedom in man- 
hood. The scion is not expected to trudge behind his sire, who 
succeeded his grandsire, but, on the contrary, to strike out for himself, 
when moved by inward capacity for advancement. 

Where there are privileged orders to be fed and kept fat for society 
show-beef and birds, and honors, commissions, and offices are dis- 
pensed by royal favor, or by royal proxies, the wheel of fortune is 
turned by hand, clean or dirty as the case may be, like the wheel of 
a lottery containing a few prize numbers and many blanks ; but where 
the goddess Fortune is neither fettered nor blindfolded, and there is 
free admission to the industries and the professions, and all the human 
pursuits which employ civilized society are open opportunities to 
necessity and ambition, fortune has nothing to do Avith the choice of 
service, but only with the delivery of the compensations and prizes in 
dollars and distinctions. And hence we see in the high places in 
Washington and in the States, and at the head of the industries and 
the professions, men moved by mental power and moral worth from the 
ranks of the honest poor to the foremost and uppermost positions. 

All men work up or dow^n, for no sane man is content to stand still 
on the same step in a flight of stairs between two floors ; and to move 
forward is to go up and to go backward is to go down. Fame must be 
won else it cannot be worn ; fame must be built'of deeds substantial 
as monumental stones, or it cannot be perpetuated, for fame is the 
evidence of things seen with the eye of the understanding ; but 
wealth amassed by a hoarder of dollars, like a hay-stack after a 
mower has pitched to its top his last forkfiill of grass, is apt to 
diminish, for farm stock must have fodder, and heirs have voracity 



the same as rats ; expansion and contraction are parts of one law, as 
the up and down ends of a seesaw are parts of one board. 

There is a standard measure and rule and a true balance ; and 
persons and things measured and weighed are sometimes short, some- 
times light; but despite the imperfections and inequalities in human 
nature, there has been no recent reaction in the progress of the world, 
for Christian peoples now girth the globe, and new ideas grow among 
the old traditions. Public opinion is a pei'vading power, tending 
more and more to a prevailing influence in cabinet, council, and camp. 

Trust in God and His purposes, and meantime rely on yourself, 
and in honest ways strive for honorable ends. And this is true of 
nations as of individuals ; for a nation in its governing force is one 
man multiplied by many, as, indeed, is the population of the earth the 
posterity of one mated pair — Adam and Eve. For evidence of the 
past look to the books, which, however imperfect, are the only wit- 
nesses that survive for history except ruins. 

Before attempting to forecast probabilities, watch current events, 
and weigh the men in high places, as weather doctors consult the 
barometer, to ascertain the pressure of the atmosphere, and the ther- 
mometer, which tells the degree of temperature. 

Thus the weather-vane and mercury-tube do much for man ; and 
the equivalent of whatsoever has been accomplished is possible of 
repetition ; and where the people are intelligent, and incumbents of 
office are patriotic to country and true to duty, the ends attained 
tend to the common good of mankind ; for developments due to men- 
tal and moral causes dispel superstition and illuminate darkness. 

France is a flame in a lighthouse lantern on a coast strewn with 
wrecks, and Paris is an illuminated clock to the capitals of Europe, 
where chronometers are not corrected to the sun on the meridian, but 
are regulated to the phases of affairs, on different faces for separated 
places, like a time-piece with dials showing the hour and minute in all 
the principal cities around the globe. 

There are other eruptions besides volcanoes which bury cities, and 
there are subterranean fires other than those in the bowels of the 
earth, which make its surface tremble and its crust crack ; for public 
opinion aroused in anger can pour out a wrath as sure to overwhelm 
as lava poured from a crater is certain to harden in a winding-sheet. 

Under the Republic, since February, 1871, France has achieved 
more than appeared possible in so few years. Hence France is an 
exemplar for other nations, and the United States of Europe is a con- 
summation possible to the masses, in whom there is a latent fire 
like electricity, which, though invisible in the atmosphere, is irresist- 
ible in the thunderbolt. And, as a storm with lightning purifies the 



9 

summer air which human beings breathe into their lungs, so revolu- 
tion, with its elements in anger, is a sanitary agent where dynastic 
abuses offend the sense of practical economy and deteriorate the public 
morals and political health. A dynasty is a piece of ground watered 
by irrigation like a cranberry patch or a rice plantation, and produces 
results according as it is fed with the rainfall of other land, through 
the w^orj\S of other hands. A republic of free states is an orchard of 
fruit-trees ; it blossoms and bears. 

A plough turns a furrow and breaks the ground for a new crop. 
And revolution turns the subsoil uppermost to bury the weeds turned 
down, and give the corn planted room to grow and ripen into golden 
ears. Without revolution the "Dark Ages," which cover with night 
more than half the Christian era, would have been prolonged through 
more centuries. To revolution humanity is indebted for the American 
Union, the climax of free government, at the date of the Declaration 
of Independence, and also at its centennial celebration. Revolution 
is public opinion expressed successfully; and no government can defy 
or ignore public opinion with impunity, for it is everywhere the supreme 
power, when it approximates unanimity in judgment and action. How 
careful and prompt are the ambassadors and ministers of kings and 
queens on the chess-board of Europe, to make a case or an excuse for 
a transaction or a treaty ! How anxious they are to make sharp prac- 
tice pass for fair play ! as, for instance, when Austria was told to carve 
tw^o bones off Turkey, through muscles and sinews, the Berlin Con- 
gress gave the appropriation the appearance of an European mandate 
rouged in the interest of peace; but Bosnia and Herzegovina were not 
to be assigned without protest wnth weapons, and the Berlin pretext 
deceived nobody, for nowadays important facts are communicated simul- 
taneously to all men who read newspapers and draw conclusions. 
The telegram travels faster in wire to circulate the news, than the 
earth turns on its axis to greet the sun ; steamships straight-line the 
oceans, and locomotive engines race-course the continents. 

The Congress of Berlin, called to consider the treaty of San Ste- 
fano, determined fewer issues than it deferred ; and hence the uncer- 
tainty which prevailed before it met has not been diminished since it 
adjourned. International questions put off to sleep are in a condition 
of quiet which may be broken at any time, and the recuperated party 
roused refreshed for another strife. What Russia needs to satisfy its 
necessities — national and international — is forecasted and understood; 
but how manj^ months or how many years Russia may have to wait, 
and how and where Russia may have to venture and strike, to reach 
its goal is, of course, problematical. 

The cause of Russia can have but one finality ; its course is to a 



10 



destination not in doubt, for it is the most conspicuous objective point 
in the Eastern Hemisphere, by reason of its ancient time and modern 
date antecedents and the jealousies and cross purposes which perplex 
the European situation. 

Unquestionably the war indemnity mentioned in the San Stefano 
treaty, in a clause which the Berlin Congress did not supplement, is 
an ember in hot ashes, where a little stirring will make a smpke and 
start a fire. And before the Russians recross the Balkans, homeward 
bound, and evacuate Varna, and leave Bulgaria among the buzzards, 
there are sundry settlements to be made, in which the army of occu- 
pation can cooperate with St. Petersburg like a fleet with London. 

Anti-Russian diplomacy exceeds equivocation when it professes to 
believe that the Russian people will rest on any treaty as final and 
conclusive which does not assure to Russia military and naval facili- 
ties to keep the straits open to Russian ships. Nothing short of such 
security will satisfy Russia or make peace permanent. 

And as the map of the American Union will not be finished till its 
northern boundary, where it is a tangent fence be taken down, and 
sunk out of sight where it is a water-course, neither will the map of 
Russia be finished till more acquisitions in Europe and in Tartary are 
included in its consolidated empire; for the Black Sea is in verity a 
bottle, of which Constantinople is the cork ; the cities in the basin of 
the Oxus — the theatre of momentous events in past times — are, in 
these latter days, only way stations. The mountain water-shed be- 
tween the Oxus, which flows north, and the Indus, which flows south, 
is the main divide between India, under the rule of a foreign country 
on an ocean island far away, and Khanates which are dovetailed 
parts of the Russian Empire, with commercial interests in common 
with Orenburg, and Astrakhan ; because it is the policy of Russia to 
seek and strive to Russianize wheresoever it reaches and holds fast ; 
whereas. Great Britain has, in no sense, Anglicized India, which it 
manipulates as if 1,558,254 square miles of territory were a plan- 
tation, and 240,000,000 inhabitants were so many chattels, utilized 
for the profit of absentees, less the cost of administration. 



CHAPTER II. 



The 1814-15 Congress of Vienna could not be repeated; nor can 
any one read the proceedings of that body in Thiers' " Napoleon" 
without indignation that Austria, which merited so little from Napo- 
leon's overthrow, was allotted so many spoils, largely at the expense 



11 

of France. But, since 1815, Germany has been organized and Italy 
united; Rome is restored to the ruler of Italy, and Berlin is the court 
of a great poAver. Russia, like the United States, has a mission to 
prosecute and frontiers to rectify ; neither of the two, however, has 
dreams for trans-ocean empire. England's policy has made "the rich 
richer and the poor poorer," till now the poor of the British Isles are 
the poorest among the peoples of Europe ; and that British exaction 
in India makes human food for famine in that naturally bountiful 
land, oflficial records abundantly prove and demonstrate. In " The 
Nineteenth Century," a London monthly review, dated August, 1878, 
Miss Florence Nightingale, in an article which is an indictment of 
Great Britain for wholesale murder, says: "In Southern India, that 
is, in Mysore, Bombay and Madras, our loss in one year's famine has 
not been far short of six million souls!'' Austria is held together, not 
by a fusion of particles, like a car-wheel cast in a mould on a foundry 
floor, but like a wheel consisting of a hub, spokes and fellies, made by 
a worker in wood, and held together by an iron tire, put on by a 
blacksmith. Turkey made conquest in Europe with the sword, and 
threatened to extirpate Christian civilization. And when, finally, its 
reverses checked its progress, its conquests were still large, for the 
Black Sea was a Turkish lake, entirely surrounded with Turkish terri- 
tory, till 1774, when Russia made its frontier on the Black Sea, west 
of the Crimea, and, in 1783, added the Crimea to its acquisitions. 

Through subsequent wars between Russia and Turkey, Russia * 
acquired more and more Black Sea border from Turkey ; and so 
Russia obtained territory on its south side in the Black Sea basin by 
conquest, as the American Union obtained territory on its south side 
in the Mississippi basin, by purchase. And Europe and America are 
both bettered thereby. 

What Louisiana was that Manitoba is, and what Louisiana is — a 
State in the Union, abutting on the Gulf of Mexico — Manitoba will 
be — a State of the Union abutting on Hudson Bay. Then the Union 
will have the sea on all sides, east, west, north and south ; for its 
shores will be washed by the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, the 
Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay ; and its structural anatomy will be 
complete with the body of the continent divided into free states, united 
for national objects, into a Union which has withstood the trial of 
foreign wars and the severer test of civil strife. There is no line for 
the partition of the North American Union, nor for the permanent 
partition of the North American Continent. The West, the core of 
the country, will have at command and in use facilities for communi- 
cation with Lake Winnipeg via Pembina, as it now has with Lake 
Michigan, via Peoria, by river and canal; and with Hudson Bay, by 



• 12 . 

rail, as it now has witli the Gulf coast and the Atlantic coast, by rail, 
to all the seaports from Texas to Maine. 

To be sure, there will be detractors who will disparage Hudson 
Bay, depreciate its navigation facilities and exaggerate its obstructions 
from ice ; but it cannot be gainsaid that it has a summer season of 
open and safe navigation, and that the Hudson Bay Company did 
utilize it throughout its long and eventful history. 

In sooth, in Smollett's "History of England," on the reign of 
George the Second (time 1748), a hundred and thirty years ago, it is 
mentioned that Parliament was petitioned "that the trade of Hudson 
Bay might be laid open;" but the Company, having an exclusive 
patent, resisted the proposition, which was given the go-by, on the 
ground that it would entail "public expense," the aim being then, as 
since, to make the St. Lawrence the commercial base of operations 
across the continent, on British territory. But the St Lawrence 
route is an open navigation for only half of the year, and its outlet 
is high up in the north, compared with the Erie-Canal-Hudson-River 
route. Hence, for Dominion interests to demur to the use of Hudson 
Bay for a tide-water terminus for overland rail and inland water-line 
traffic, will be regarded by the West, when the subject attracts its 
serious attention, about as if Buffalo were to protest that western 
traffic ought not be forwarded east from the Mississippi River, via 
Florida Strait. 

Precisely as the western part of Pennsylvania — an eastern State — 
is in the Mississippi basin, and Pittsburgh has its main market in the 
West, so the northern parts of Minnesota and Dakota — a western 
State and a western Territory — are in the Winnipeg basin ; and Lake 
Winnipeg will be put in artificial water-line communication with the 
Mississippi River system of boat navigation, via the Red River of the 
North, to the Upper Missouri and the Upper Mississippi, exactly as 
Lake Michigan is connected with the Mississippi River system by canal 
from Chicago to the Illinois River. 

There is no international line between New York and San Fran- 
cisco, and the international line between New Orleans and Winnipeg 
will be obliterated ; for the water-shed between Hudson Bay and the 
Gulf of Mexico is a roof with little inclination and a low apex, and 
which sends the drainage of its north side down the Nelson River 
spout, and from its south side down the Mississippi River channel to a 
common level in seas which commingle their waters in the Atlantic 
Ocean, via Hudson Strait and the Strait of Florida. 

The French Republic, first established in 1792, was usurped by 
Napoleon, who was declared First Consul in 1799, and was proclaimed 
Emperor and croAvned by the Pope in 1804. The second Republic 



13 

was organized in 1848, and Louis Napoleon was elected President ; 
he destroyed it by the coiqj d'etat December 2, 1851 ; was declared 
Emperor December 2, 1852. Coveting the Rhine Provinces, war on 
Germany was declared July 15, 1870 ; on the 2d August he tele- 
graphed to the Empress that at the storming of the heights of Saar- 
bruck the Prince Imperial "Louis has received his baptism of fire." 
Thirty days thereafter, September 1, he surrendered with MacMahon's 
army at Sedan, and on the 4th September the Empire succumbed to 
the popular indignation, and the Republic was proclaimed, in the Hotel 
de Ville. And the third Republic is a field oak Avith roots and 
branches, bearing seed acorns for other soils and leaves for wreaths 
on decoration days. 

By peace, patience and perseverance the third Republic in seven 
years made France prosperous and potential ; and the third Republic 
is built to stay and stand, for it is the choice of France, over and over 
again confirmed, as a necessity to its harmony and happiness, against 
the remnants and shreds of dynastic factions made up of Bourbons, 
Orleanists and Buonapartists, some of whom would exterminate where 
not permitted to reconstruct, with old material found in ruins ; the 
third Republic, however, is approved, vindicated and justified, as the 
elections continuously attest; and thus the third Republic, as devel- 
oped under the quickening power of Thiers and Gambetta, and a host 
of steadfast men wise in experience and keen in forecast, is a cov- 
enant of promise against a background of despotism, conspicuous in 
its colors as a rainbow against a cloud after a storm. 

The eight provinces which (including Newfoundland) make up the 
Dominion of Canada are hitched together behind a pilot motor called 
a Governor-General, appointed by the occupant of the British throne, 
as cars are coupled in a train behind a steam engine called a loco- 
motive, and do not constitute a congruous governmental machine, 
symmetrical and homogeneous in its political parts ; whereas the 
Union may be likened to a political planetarium, in which the States 
move in orbits with the harmony of the heavenly bodies, and where 
the Constitution, eff^ulgent as the sun, is a source of light to the nation 
and a beacon of hope to man, under clouded skies, in other lands. 

Nor can the Dominion machine move without friction, because it is 
engineered in London, through submarine wire-shafting, otherwise 
known as the Atlantic cable, liable to abrasion on the ridges in the 
ocean's floor and accident from other causes. 

The States of the Union, moreover, are the offspring of a co-opera- 
tive compact which has a seat of reason, inductive and deductive, in 
universal education in public schools of grades that rise like pyramidal 
steps from a base in the alphabet to a summit in the sciences, and 



14 

a nervous system sensitive to right and wrong, and quick to respond 
to whatever concerns the common country ; for no matter where men- 
aced or by Avhom assailed, order must be maintained in society and 
unity preserved in the government ; because the Union is a political 
body permeated and pervaded with the influences and laws of attrac- 
tion, cohesion and gravitation, which jointly fit it for its mission among 
the nations, as the earth is adjusted and charged for perpetual motion 
in the universe. 

The Dominion, in contradistinction to the Union, is a new evolu- 
tion from an old idea conceived in Eufope, and, though sent hither to 
hatch mischief, is impotent to realize expectations either in practice 
or prospect, as where a reptile hatched out of a snake's egg, put into 
a hen's nest to scatter a brood of chickens, was scotched before it had 
fangs to bite. 

True, the Dominion is susceptible of congelation into a solid mass 
by the agency of cold in winter, when it is cemented with ice and 
asleep under the snow. In midsummer, however, when the Winnipeg 
basin is in its beauty, there is a partial thaw in the walrus region, and 
ice-cakes, frozen in the wind from the north pole, drift out through the 
sounds and channels into BaflSn Bay and Davis Strait, and float down 
the coast in the arctic current, making the air thick with fog and the 
provincial nose "blue" as the sky overhead, when the weather is 
exceptionally clear. 

And if the Dominion, in a political thaw, were to break into pieces 
like the principal staple of its walrus region, British Columbia would 
drift into the Union via Puget Sound, Manitoba would tie fast to 
Minnesota, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick would enter through 
open doors into the sisterhood of New England States, for political 
worship at a common national shrine. 

Halifax would then in verity be the east portal open to Europe, as 
San Francisco is the west portal of America open to Asia. And as 
Halifax is on and of the seaboard, not in nor of the St. Lawrence, it 
ought to aspire to be the front door of the Union rather than the side 
door of the Dominion, for alternative use in winter time, when the 
St. Lawrence, its main artery, is closed with ice against Quebec and 
Montreal. 

Halifax, notwithstanding that it was founded in 1749, a hundred 
and twenty-nine years ago, is to-day surpassed in population by more 
than thirty cities in the United States, and hj three cities in the 
Dominion (Quebec, Montreal and Toronto), one on Lake Ontario, two 
on the St. Lawrence, all rival and antagonistic to Halifax, when not 
under embargo from ice. Contrast Halifax, as the Atlantic end of an 
overland railway route through the Union to the Pacific in California, 



15 

with the projected overland railway route through the Dominion to 
the Pacific in British Columbia. Consider Halifax as a winter harbor 
for its three Dominion rivals, that evade it when navigation is open, 
with Halifax in the "mind's eye" as a naval station, commercial 
dock and warehouse in the Union, at the shortest ferry across the 
ocean that divides the new world from the old. Halifax in the Do- 
minion is out of its legitimate sphere, like a ship caught in ice and 
borne away from its true destination. 

But reaction is not uncommon in subject populations, where the 
yoke galls man, wisely made less patient than the ox, so that he may 
emancipate himself out of servitude to mortals of kindred clay, mould 
and manufacture, for sometimes the loftiest in the sight of the world 
are the lowliest seen from heaven. The words devil and tyrant are 
synonymous, because both typify the spirit of evil ; and as it is mer- 
itorious to cast out a devil, so is it meritorious to overthrow a tyrant 
or a despotism. Therefore, where there is oppression, revolution is a 
righteous remedy ; and forced provincial allegiance is oppression, 
because the provincial condition diifers from the national condition as 
apprenticeship differs from journeymanship, with the option of mas- 
tership open with conditions common to all. In the Union a citizen 
may be content to vote, or he may aspire to candidateship, as an 
apprentice, after having served out his time, may be content to work 
for an employer or aspire to mastership in his calling or art; and 
Nova Scotia, having first refused to enter the Dominion, subsequently 
consented to be counted in with Quebec and Ontario, with which 
provinces it has little afiiliation and not much intertrade. Indeed, 
in the company of the cities of Quebec and Montreal at Ottawa, Hal- 
ifax is not unlike a third person present where there are two friends 
mutually anxious for a private conversation. 

New Brunswick and Maine abut against each other, divided by a 
treaty fence, the first a province with a population of 285,594 in 
1871, the latter a State with a population of 626,915 in 1870. New 
Brunswick was settled by the French in 1639. Maine was admitted 
into the Union in 1820. 

Nova Scotia was visited by Europeans in 1497 and colonized in 
1604, sixteen years before the first settlement in Massachusetts was 
made by the Puritans at Plymouth Rock. Nova Scotia, too, has 
developed coal deposits, Massachusetts has none ; and 3'et in 1870 
Massachusetts contained 1,457,351 of population on 7800 square 
miles of territory, against 387,800 of population in Nova Scotia on 
18,600 square miles of territory. Boston, the principal city of Mas- 
sachusetts, has New York and the Hudson River between it and the 
West, its main market, and back of Boston is Montreal, with commu- 



IG 

nications west into the interior and east to the seacoast. Contrast 
Massachusetts with Nova Scotia, Boston with Halifax, and credit the 
difference in favor of the American citizen over the British subject, 
to the political circumstance that Massachusetts is a sovereign State 
loyal to free institutions, Nova Scotia a subject colony allegiant to a 
foreign kingdom twenty-five hundred miles away. 

The "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland" contains 
Britons in England, Scotland and Wales, and Irishmen in Ireland. 
But a Nova Scotian in the Dominion of Canada is a provincialist, and 
the Dominion is a colonial dependence, not an independent nation. 

In 1283 Wales was finally subdued' by England and annexed by 
conquest; and yet there are at this day thousands in Wales who use 
the ancestral tongue and do not understand the English language. 
The Scotchman is never an Englishman, though he may be more pro- 
nouncedly British than English or Welsh Britons. 

In the Union the native-born and the adopted from abroad bear 
one common name — American citizen. The American race, made up 
of many breeds and crosses by immigration and intermarriage (but 
not by invasion like that of William the Norman, who stayed where 
he conquered), dominates North America with free institutions, along- 
side of which the European transplant will fail of propagation and die 
of frost in the bud. 

Hudson Bay is to the hydrographic basin of Lake Winnipeg, which 
discharges its waters down the Nelson River, precisely what the Gulf 
of Mexico is to the basin bounded on the east and west by the Rocky 
and Allegheny Mountains, which sends its waters down the Missis- 
sippi River. 

And Hudson Strait is the Seagate of the Saskatchewan Valley via 
Lake Winnipeg, as Florida Strait is the Seagate of the Mississippi 
Valley via the Gulf of Mexico. 

The St. Lawrence is a narrow basin, and the group of connected 
lake's which empty into it, albeit they are inland seas in a fresh-water 
navigation sense, drains but an inconsiderable area of Dominion ter- 
ritory, compared with the area of Manitoba territory in the basin of 
Lake Winnipeg. 

Moreover, Lake Erie, which is the distributing pool of the three 
lakes west and northwest of it, is connected with the Hudson River 
by the famous Erie Canal — an artificial work equivalent to a river in 
capacity and importance; and exactly as Lake Erie is connected with 
the Hudson River by a water-line of cheap and easy navigation, so 
may Lake Winnipeg be connected with the Mississippi River system 
of boat navigation via the Red River of the North, and, it may be, 
Lake Traverse and the Minnesota River Valley. From Lake Tra- 



17 

verse, considered as a summit reservoir, the descent north to Lake 
Winnipeg is only 366 feet, and the descent south to the Mississippi 
River at the mouth of Minnesota River is only 299 feet. The mode- 
rate altitude of the Lake Traverse summit-level establishes the prac- 
ticality of artificial navigation between the Minnesota River and the 
Red River of the North ; but as the paramount consideration is a 
boat communication between the Mississippi River and Lake Winni- 
peg, the best route is a question which only intelligent engineering 
and summit-level water supply can decide. 
Here are the elevations above sea-level : — 

Feet. 

Lake Traverse, at head-waters of Minnesota River and the Red 

River of the North, 994 

Lake Winnipeg, into which Red River empties, . . . 628 

Difference of elevation in about 050 miles distance, . . . 366 

Lake Traverse, as before, ....... 994 

Mississippi River, at mouth of Minnesota River, . . . 695 

Difference of elevation in 256 miles, ..... 299 

Red River, low-water mark, at Moorhead, where Northern Pacific 

Railroad crosses it, . . . . . . . . 875 

Lake Winnipeg, as before, ....... 628 

Red River, at Moorhead, above Lake Winnipeg, . . • 247 

Lake Traverse, as before, ....... 994 

Red River, at Moorhead, as before, ..... 875 



Elevation of Lake Traverse above Red River, at Moorhead, . 119 

Moorhead is the head of steamboat navigation and Breckenridge 
the head of boat navigation on the Red River of the North. 

Canal excavation in the prairie bottom into which the Red River 
of the North cut its channel would be easy work, and would shorten 
d'l&t-dnce -south of Moorhead. 

Indeed, by a bold cut, like the one through the peninsula summit 
on the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, a great saving of distance 
may be accomplished between the Red River of the North and the 
Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, or either of them. Canals that con- 
nect navigable waters have lost none of their consequence, but, on the 
contrary, annually acquire additional importance, as witness the Dela- 
ware and Raritan Canal between Philadelphia and New York, the 
Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, the Erie Canal, the Welland Canal, 
and the Illinois and Lake Michigan Canal. 



18 

The Welland Canal, a Dominion work which connects Lake Ontario 
with Lake Erie, has 330 feet of lockage in 27 miles of distance ; and 
so there are 31 more feet of elevation between Lakes Ontario and Erie 
than there are between the Mississippi River at the mouth of the Min- 
nesota River and Traverse Lake, in a distance of 256 miles, and 211 
more feet of elevation between Lakes Ontario and Erie than between 
Traverse Lake and Red River at Moorhead. 

The Red River of the North has an average descent of less than 
seven inches in the mile ; is navigable for steamboats 275 miles, and 
available for small boats and barges a longer distance. The Red 
River of the North can be utilized for the joint accommodation and 
mutual interest of Winnipeg, Pembina and St. Paul, and other centres 
of inland intertrade. Railroad bridges across it, but a few feet above 
high-water mark, can be elevated or provided with draws as on other 
rivers. 

The Northwest had a very small population when the Erie Canal 
was opened in 1825, but look now at its tonnage and consider its im- 
portance as an artery of trade. And from Albany and Buffalo turn 
to St. Paul and Winnipeg ; cast the horoscope of Minnesota, and dis- 
cern first a million, next two millions, and after that more millions of 
population, with St. Paul expanded into an emporium of trade cor- 
respondingly conspicuous, boats plying the navigable water route and 
cars speeding the railway track between St. Paul and Winnipeg ; 
Manitoba a State of the Union, and the population of the Mississippi 
Valley counted by more millions than are at this time in North 
America, north of Mexico ; not crowded as in China proper, however, 
where in an area of 1,534,953 square miles there are 405,213,152 
human beings, the territory occupied being less than half the size 
of the United States ; and where, in the province of Ganhwuy, on 
58,468 square miles, there were years ago 36,596,858 inhabitants; 
as close together and densely packed almost as honey bees in a hive, 
and not unlike the honey-bee-housekeepers in industry to provide and 
economy to save ; but in the ratio of Europe west of the longitude of 
Belgrade and Warsaw, comprising Germany, Italy, France, Spain, 
Belgium, Holland, and Great Britain. 

Nor is there fancy or exaggeration in this prospect ; for already 
in matters appertaining to middle North America the word West — a 
term of magnitude like the term East in Europe applied to Asia — has 
absorbed the far west, southwest and northwest, and, along with the 
basin of the Mississippi River, includes the basins of the lakes west 
of Niagara Falls, and all the region between salt water in the Gulf of 
Mexico and Hudson Bay. 

From Washington, New Mexico and Montana, and all between, are 



19 

in the West ; as from London, Hindostan and Siberia, and all between 
and beyond, are in the East, 

The imagination is not chargeable with extravagance where predic- 
tion has been surpassed by performance and dreams have been real- 
ized in persons and things substantial. 

Consider : A zone checkered with States across the continent where 
it is three thousand miles across, between the Atlantic and Pacific 
oceans ; an interior basin, with thirty-six degrees of longitude between 
its rim in the Alleghany Mountain in Pennsylvania and the Rocky 
Mountains in Montana ; its diameter one-tenth the circumference of the 
globe ; its area ten times the size of Great Britain and Ireland, and 
six times the size of France ; and which interior basin between moun- 
tain watersheds, if peopled in the ratio per square mile of France in 
1872, would contain 216,000,000 of inhabitants ; a basin dotted with 
cities from Pittsburgh to Denver, from New Orleans to St. Paul, into 
which cities are gathered for market the plenteous harvests from 
prairies and plains, from valleys with rivers in their laps, and from 
table lands among the mountains; a belt of earth made luxuriant and 
bountiful by nature, containing millions of acres under tillage, pro- 
ducing crops not equalled in other climes, and millions of acres open 
for settlement and cultivation to immigrants from foreign lands, and 
to native citizens prone to withdraw from large towns and small 
farms, to enjoy a preferred life on the frontier, remote from neighbor- 
hood and noise. 



CHAPTER III. 

At the beginning of the present century there was no State west 
of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River. Since January 1, 1802, 
twenty-two new States have been admitted into the Union — one for 
every three years. At the date mentioned, Pennsylvania was the 
frontier State on the fortieth parallel of north latitude ; but there are 
now on that geographical line, west of the " Keystone" of the original 
thirteen States that won independence and framed the Constitution — 
twin achievements and a double fame — eight States and one Territory, 
admitted at these dates, to wit: 



Ohio, 


1802 


Missouri, 


1821 


Nevada, 


1864 


Indiana, 


1816 


Kansas, 


1861 


California, 


1850 


Illinois, 


1818 


Colorado, 


1876 


Utah, Ter., 


1850 



Michigan, 


1837 


Nebraska, 


1867 


Wisconsin, 


1847 


Oregon, 


1859 


Minnesota, 


1857 


Dakota, Ter., 


1861 


Iowa, 


1845 


Montana, Ter., 


1864 



20 

North of the fortieth parallel, since 1800, there have been six 
States and six Territories admitted, at these dates, to wit : 

Idaho, Ter., 1863 

Washington, Ter., 1853 

Wyoming, Ter., 1868 

Alaska, Ter., 1868 

Area of the thirteen original States, . . 318,572 square miles. 

Area of the thirty-eight States and eleven 

Territories, 3,580,238 

In 1800 there were sixteen States in the Union, and the 

population was ....... 5,308,483 

In 1870. there were thirty-seven States and twelve Terri- 
tories in the Union, and the population was . . 88,558,371 

In 1878 there are thirty-eight States and eleven Terri- 
tories in the Union, and the estimated population is 47,000,000 

Minnesota State and Dakota Territory both abut on Manitoba;, 
and how rapidly the public lands in Minnesota and Dakota are being 
disposed of by the United States appears in the following compara- 
tive statement for the fiscal years ended June 30, 1877, and June 30, 
1878, the same price per acre prevailing in both years : 

Total, 1878. Total, 1877. Increase. 

Minnesota, $1,041,203 12 $279,847 02 $761,356 10 

Dakota, 1,461,801 73 218,378 20 1,243,423 53 



Total, $2,503,004 85 $498,225 22 $2,004,779 63 

Increase in one year, four hundred and two (402) per cent. 

In British America a very large percentage of the territory is un- 
cultivable ; and north of the sixtieth parallel of latitude the popula- 
tion will always be exceedingly sparse, if human beings only be 
enumerated, and migratory fauna, fish and fowl not counted. 

South of Texas the coast lines converge to the Isthmus of Tehuan- 
tepec, and at the Isthmus of Panama they are but a span apart. 

In the manifested destiny of nations North America is reserved for 
free institutions, for within it monarchy has perished in ignominy each 
time that it was tried ; and the principal success in North America is 
the Republic of the United States, which comprises its best parts, and 
will include more and more of it, from time to time, howsoever British 
diplomacy may plot to prevent. For no dynasty can be exalted in 
America, where the supreme power is in the people, who put lunatics 
in infirqiaries, and disbelieve in thrones and titles, and where kings 



21 

and princes are tolerated only in mimic parts in theatrical amusements. 
Aged penitents who were peculators and speculators before fortune 
made them conservatives, sycophants destitute of manhood pride, and 
title-worshipping snobs and obsequious flunkeys may pretend other- 
wise, and ask for more license from London ; but the precedents fur- 
nished by Mexico are fitted for Canada. 

Personally, Maximilian was unexceptionable; but politically, he 
was intolerable, and in the order of events fell a victim to one of the 
messengers of death imported in his behalf to make Mexicans his sub- 
jects by force of arms. Subjects in America, forsooth ! The word may 
be blotted out of the politics of Europe, for the citizen may succeed the 
subject in Europe, as well outside as inside of France, where all forms 
of government have had trial in peace and in war, and where the Re- 
public, Avhich, in 1870, succeeded the empire, is a pronounced success, 
with a record that is a marvel among the nations. 

Mexico, as a Republic, has a mission in America, where the two 
Republics do not jostle each other, for there is room for two, side by 
side. The city of Mexico is well situated for communication with the 
interior country and the sea coasts ; whereas, Ottawa, the capital of 
the temporary Dominion of Canada, distant only fifty-five miles from 
Ogdensburg, in the State of New York, will be twenty-six hundred 
miles distant from the Pacific waters, by the Canada Pacific Railway, 
when built, from Ottawa to Port Moody, in British Columbia ! The 
railways of the Dominion, financially considered, may have had blos- 
soms in prospectuses, but have not had fruits in profits ; but, bad as 
the fiscal showing is in the official reports of roads years in use, there 
will be still less comfort derived from the earnings of the Canada 
Pacific Railway, to offset its prodigious cost ; for its route, like much 
of the route of the Inter-Colonial Railway, is through a region of 
minimum local resources; and what its through traffic is to consist of, 
and whence it is to come, is an inquiry adjourned till after it shall 
have been inaugurated, and. then — what? Why, then, the farce 
annually repeated at the Canada Grand Trunk Railway meeting will 
be played simultaneously on two stages, where pay-roll officials are 
the actors and investors make up the audience of dupes. 

A railway from Frazer River southward to a connection with a line 
to San Francisco would be Avorth more to British Columbia than the 
Canada Pacific Railway can be, east of Manitoba; and the same is 
true of Manitoba and the railway via Winnipeg and Pembina, against 
the Canada Pacific Railway extended east of the Red River of the 
North to Ottawa. 

Contemplate the intertrade of the Atlantic States, and think of 
British Columbia along with Washington Territory and the States of 



22 

Oregon and California. Think of the intertrade between Ohio river 
towns and New Orleans and throughout the Mississippi basin, from 
Pittsburgh to Denver, and consider Manitoba as a State in sympathy 
with Minnesota and in cooperation with other States, down to the Gulf 
of Mexico, From Manitoba the outlook is south, not east, and the 
interest of Manitoba is — and its aspirations ought to be — to advance 
from an inland province into a maritime State like Louisiana. 

Indeed, it is a hypothesis founded on ancient watermarks and topo- 
graphical indications that time was when the surface of Lake Win- 
nipeg was higher than its present level, the prairie bottom of Manitoba 
under water, and the outflow to the sea via Traverse Lake and down 
the Minnesota valley into the Mississippi River, till a break was made 
through the ridge which walled in the great reservoir on its north 
side, and the channel in which flows Nelson River was opened to Hud- 
son Bay, now Middle Sea. 

Chautauqua Lake, in the southwest corner of New York, is 1306 
feet above the level of the sea and 738 feet above the level of Lake 
Erie, from which it is only seven miles distant ; but Chautauqua Lake 
discharges its waters not into Lake Erie, seven miles distant, but into 
the Gulf of Mexico, twenty-four hundred miles away, via the Alle- 
gheny, Ohio and Mississippi Rivers. 

But, whether the waters of Lake Winnipeg priorily flowed south, 
down a gentle incline, or escaped north, down falls and rapids, the 
substantial fact remains, that Manitoba may be put in navigable com- 
munication with the Mississippi River, so that boats may be passed 
from Winnipeg to St. Paul, and even from Hudson Bay to the Gulf 
of Mexico ; as boats can now navigate a continuous water- route between 
New Orleans and Quebec, via the Illinois River and the canal thence 
to Chicago, whence the way is open to the lower St. Lawrence. 

Lake Winnipeg may be made a commercial dock or pool like Lake 
Erie, if its navigation be connected by canal with the river navigation 
of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, as Lake Erie is connected with 
tide-water in the St. Lawrence, via the Welland Canal, and with the 
Hudson River by the Erie Canal, a work to which New York State is 
indebted for its "empire" rank, and New York city for its commercial 
supremacy. 

The Saskatchewan and the Missouri are kindred rivers, whose 
sources are near together in the Rocky Mountains, and the communi- 
ties along the sister river banks will develop affinities for intertrade 
that will promote commercial intercourse and political co-partnership; 
for the Frazer River and the Columbia River, the Missouri River and 
the Saskatchewan River, like the rivers which flow from fountains 
among the peaks of the Allegheny Mountain, down both its sides. 



23 

all drain parts of one country, pervaded by a common sympathy, which 
an artificial line cannot dissever nor distract. 

St. Paul is an important steamboat terminus and a conspicuous 
centre of railway traffic. From St. Paul there are 1940 miles of 
steamboat navigation southward to New Orleans, and 1913 miles of 
steamboat navigation eastward to Pittsburgh. On the Mississippi 
river and its principal tributaries there are 16,674 miles of river navi- 
gation. Verily, the Mississippi River system is an inland wonder. 

Surely to Manitoba it is of paramount importance that from Lake 
Winnipeg there should be a boat navigation to the Mississippi River, 
as there is from Lake Michigan a boat navigation to the Mississippi 
River. The level of Traverse Lake is only 299 feet above the Mis- 
sissippi River at St. Paul, and 366 feet above Lake Winnipeg; but 
only 119 feet, or thirty-three per cent, of the latter difference would 
have to be overcome by lockage, because to Moorhead the Red River 
of the North is a steamboat navigation, and at Moorhead the sur- 
face of Red River is 247 feet above its surface at its mouth in Lake 
Winnipeg. 

Between Buffalo and Albany, on the famous Erie Canal, there are 
642 feet of lockage, and from Lake Erie to Montreal there are 568 
feet of lockage. 

Between the head of steamboat navigation at Moorhead, on the 
Red River of the North, and the head of navigation on the Mississippi 
River at the mouth of the Minnesota River, the lockage would be only 
418 feet, 150 feet less than the lockage between the Lake Erie head 
of the Welland Canal and Montreal on the St. Lawrence. 

No one can examine the question of the basin of the Mississippi 
main river and its tributaries and not be convinced that the Red 
River of the North, which is divided from the affluents of the Missis- 
sippi River and the Missouri River by a phenomenally low prairie 
divide with innumerable lakes, will be connected by canal with the 
navigable streams so very near it on both sides, east and west. 

Between Fort Garry, on Red River, and Lake Superior, the Do- 
minion government has in operation a route consisting of 140 miles 
of road, 8 miles of portages and 304 miles of water navigation ; total 
length 452 miles. The summit-level swamp on this route, distant 74 
miles from Prince Arthur Landing, Lake Superior, is 1483 feet above 
the level of the sea, and 489 feet higher than Lake Traverse above 
the sea; so that from the swamp summit to Lake Superior, which 
latter is 600 feet above the sea, there is a descent of 883 feet, against 
299 feet from Lake Traverse summit to the Mississippi River. 

During the year ended June 30, 1870, there were carried over the 
Dominion summer route, between Lake Superior and Fort Garry, 



• 24 

2172 passengers, a small number, considering the force employed on 
the Canada Pacific Railway, additional to resident population, emi- 
grants going out and immigrants coming in. 

During the year ended June 30, 1876, the Northern Pacific Rail- 
road carried 3645 passengers to and 6951 passengers from Moorhead 
on Red River. 

By the Canada Pacific Railway route the distance from Fort Garry 
on Red River to Lake Superior at Fort William is 410 miles. From 
Fort Garry the air-line distance is 50 miles less to Duluth in Min- 
nesota than to Fort William in Ontario. 

From Fort Garry the railroad distances south and east are : To 
the Minnesota line, by the Pembina branch, 85 miles ; to Brecken- 
ridge on Red River, 287 miles ; to St. Paul on the Mississippi River, 
504 miles ; from St. Paul to Chicago, 409 miles ; Fort Garry via 
Breckenridge and St. Paul to Chicago, 913 miles. The distance by 
rail between Chicago and Fort Garry can be shortened a hundred 
miles via Milwaukee and Thomson. 

From Chicago to New York by shortest route via Pittsburgh and 
Philadelphia, operated by the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, the 
distance is 913 miles, precisely the same as the distance from Chicago 
via St. Paul and Breckenridge to lower Fort Garry, where the Canada 
Pacific Railway crosses Red River. Total distance from Fort Garry 
through Breckenridge, St. Paul, Chicago and Philadelphia, to New 
York city, 1826 miles. From Fort Garry to Halifax by Canada 
Pacific and Intercolonial Railways via Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec, 
the distance is 2308 miles, all on Dominion territory. 

As, however, the St. Lawrence is ice-bound for half the year, com- 
prising a part of autumn, the whole of winter, and more than two- 
thirds of spring, the ports of Montreal and Quebec are of course 
closed to navigation all that time ; and as Halifax is 482 miles farther 
distant than New York city from Fort Garry, the foreign trade of 
Manitoba, if allowed to choose its own channel, will be across Min- 
nesota and through Union seaports to Europe. 

The ambition to have a through route on Dominion territory is, 
therefore, beset with drawbacks to realization insurmountable in prac- 
tice. The untrammelled intertrade between the States of the Union 
will not be overlooked by Manitoba, which will hardly consent to be 
" bottled" for political reasons formulated at Ottawa, by a propaganda 
that would transplant to the new world the political society shams of 
the old world, outside of Switzerland and France. 

Why should England endure a titled aristocracy that withholds 
from cultivation millions of acres in a country that imports much of 
its breadstuff's, pays but little tax on landed estate, arrogates social 



25 

superiority, enjoys the highest office honors, and revels in fashionable 
dissipation, with wealth to command the luxuries of life, where com- 
forts are so scarce among the masses? 

In the Union only commodities are classified, and all honors and 
opportunities are open to free competition. In Great Britain title 
and position are inherited and transmitted, and there the ballot can do 
but little good until the laws of primogeniture and entail be repealed. 

Under a dynasty, man-power, horse-power, and steam-power are all 
alike considered available for utilization in the economy of govern- 
ment. And thus man, " immortal man, made in the image of his 
Maker," is degraded to a brute and equated to a machine. His 
natural rights are restricted beyond the necessities of a legal code 
essential for order and administration, and his privileges are circum- 
scribed to a minimum radius of option ; for he is the subject of the 
crown, and is told to be thankful for the royal condescension that 
makes life bearable, under conditions which provide palaces and parks 
for inheritors of ancestral distinctions, life tenures, and entailed 
estates, and reduce the millions to an existence beset with more 
penalties than compensations, often clouded by day, seldom bright by 
night ; a purgatorial life between a worse condition under barbarism 
and a better condition under uniform rights. 

In a republic birthright is equality under the law, and free compe- 
tition for the public offices and honors and in the professions and 
pursuits. 

In a monarchy titles and honors ai^e reserved out of the common 
stock of the state, which in a republic comprises the whole people, 
whereas in a monarchy the state is an establishment administered and 
enjoyed by a law-favored class ; an aristocracy not of mind or supe- 
riority of brain capacity, but of birth under a dynastic code wherein 
prerogatives are perpetuated, contrary to the republican practice and 
the wise course of nature which with impartial hand scatters its gifts in 
the soils and rocks, where they reward the finder according as he 
earns success by his own industry and effort. 

The seasons come and go, and after every departure there is a 
return in the circle run, for nature has fixed laws which survive vicis- 
situdes in the weather ; the day runs its rounds to true time, and only 
the air is fickle in its temperature. 

Human government is comparative, and at best imperfect, because 
ambitious man is prone to discontent, and from a step mounted strives 
to climb a step higher and is overturned ; for a ladder must have two 
rests, one on the ground, the other against an object to prop its 
elevated end; and if a pit under it be opened or its support be re- 
moved, its own gravity will cause it to fall ; so government must be 



26 

founded in impartial justice, and be supported by public opinion, else 
it M'ill incline from the upright, and in its tumble down take with it 
to the ground those who made of it a ladder for selfish exaltation, in 
forgetfulness of the special providence that its top round was below 
the lookout summit where public opinion, in a republic, is a law of 
gravitation to bad men who aspire to leadership among the people. 
In a dynasty there is a standing army of bayonets ; in a republic the 
adult population is armed with the ballot, Avhich at the poll is the 
equivalent of a ball in battle. 

Louisiana is a conspicuous State in the Union by reason of its 
sugar and cotton plantations, and because it abuts on the Gulf of 
Mexico and contains the focus of Mississippi River and seaboard and 
trans-Atlantic trade in the city of New Orleans, which occupies one 
of the most commanding sites on the world's waters, for domestic 
and foreign trade, having thousands of miles of steamboat naviga- 
tion on the fresh-water rivers in its rear, and tens of thousands of 
miles of steamship navigation in the ocean currents on its front and 
flanks. 

As a State in the Union, Manitoba would attract observation and 
acquire distinction, because it abuts on Hudson Bay or Middle Sea, 
which is a summer-door to the ocean from Minnesota and the West, 
but which, notwithstanding British professions of free trade when an 
Englishman opens his mouth in Washington, is shut and barred to 
force trade down the St. Lawrence. Consider the geographical situa- 
tion of Hudson Bay, which continues the sea into the West more than 
half way across the Canada main, between the Atlantic and Pacific 
Oceans. With Hudson Bay declared a free and open sea, Manitoba 
as a maritime State would profit from a back-door on the north open 
to Europe, as Louisiana profits from a front-door on the south open 
to the West Indies and all the Atlantic coasts. 

Manitoba, as one of six States across the Union, where its axle 
would then turn on six wheels, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, 
Minnesota, and Manitoba, between two seas, one called a bay, the 
other a gulf, would have communication in all directions between the 
haunts of Newfoundland whales and Aleutian seals, tropical alligators 
and polar bears. 

True, Nelson River has rapids and falls, and so has the St. Law- 
rence and other lake and river routes, rapids and falls ; but these 
natural obstructions to navigation have been overcome by the judicious 
expenditure of money in works engineered with skill ; and thus 
through ways of art, works of nature are utilized. And compared 
with what has been expended, and wisely expended, on artificial aids 
to navigation between Lake Superior and tidewater in the St. Law- 



27 

rence, the sum needed would be small, to provide artificial aids to 
navigation from Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay. 

It is but a short distance from Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay, 
from Lake Superior to James Bay. And if the Canada Pacific Rail- 
way be located on the north side of Lake Nipigon, a short branch 
road would suffice to reach a harbor on James Bay. 

Apart from British considerations, which in the Dominion run 
counter to the logic of American events, it is its commercial merit as 
a portage railway between the Gulf of Georgia and Hudson Bay, 
through British Columbia and Manitoba, that gives the Canada Pacific 
Railway much of the interest it awakens. And as it is certain that 
Montreal will advocate branches from the Canada Pacific main line to 
ports on near-by tidewaters, Montreal cannot demur if Manitoba insist 
on a branch road to a terminus on the James Bay arm of the ocean, 
so very much nearer than tidewater in the St. Lawrence. 

The railway from Fort Garry to a junction with a Minnesota road 
from St. Paul to St. Vincent, opposite Pembina, will, at the boundary 
line, put Manitoba in railway communication with Minnesota, Winni- 
peg with St. Paul, and the railway network of the Mississippi States — 
a consideration which a Manitoban will not overlook, but which he 
will be careful to weigh and turn to account. 

A link of road from the junction of the Northern Pacific with the 
Duluth and St. Paul line at Thomson, to the Canada Pacific Railway 
on high ground west of Fort William, where it deflects northward 
and possibly will pass around Lake Nipigon, would make a seaport on 
James Bay, to be called Middlesea, the northern terminus of the 
Mississippi railway system, which now has its northernmost station at 
Duluth, Lake Superior, a fresh-water reservoir, not a part of the 
salt-water sea like James Bay. 

Undoubtedly Middlesea Avill be a grain port — a sort of Odessa — 
measured by its bushels, on James Bay, whence Hudson Strait opens 
a way to Europe, on the old track of the Hudson Bay Company's 
ships, where the season of navigation has not been shortened. 

The incorporation of British Columbia and Manitoba with Ontario, 
Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward's Island, 
was a political misalliance that will make incompatibility manifest in 
domestic discord : for whilst Manitoba will have warm fellowship with 
Minnesota, it will have only cold acquaintance with lower Ontario and 
Quebec; and whilst British Columbia will cultivate intimate relations 
with the Pacific States, and especially with the city of San Francisco, 
the Atlantic provinces of the Dominion will remain strangers to it, 
for Halifax is farther from it than is New York city. And the 
Canada Pacific Railway, failing to cause an exodus into the wilderness 



28 • 

of rigors, but serving as well to carry dissatisfied emigrants thence as 
deceived immigrants thither, will disappoint the sanguine tempera- 
ments of London, where 

" 'Tis distance lends enchantment to the view," 
And gilds the iceberg with the guinea's hue. 

Between Lake Superior and James Bay a temporary boundary, 
beyond which the Dominion may not go, is indicated in probabilities 
which are as blossoms of future fruits, depending for maturity on 
season, circumstance and time. 

A subject is not a citizen ; a subject is required to be allegiant to 
a dynasty to which are mortgaged the natural rights of his posterity, 
from generation to generation ; a citizen, on the contrary, is loyal to 
his government, of which he is a vital part, and which he operates 
through proxies appointed by the ballot that thinks and counts, and 
therein diifers from the bayonet, which is only a tool ; and as the 
judicious citizen is careful of his own body, to preserve his health and 
prolong his life, so is he also watchful of the republic, especially when 
danger lowers and a crisis impends, ready and anxious with the remedy 
which the ballot contains, to cure abuses that degrade localities and 
deteriorate the civil service. 

Since the first pair were cast out of Eden, and Adam was told " to 
till the ground from whence he was taken," there has been no paradise 
on the earth. But a republic approximates paradise, compared with 
other governments, as Christian piety approximates perfection, com- 
pared with Turkish brutality and Mahometan absolutism. 

Personal government is despotism, illustrated in the First and the 
Third — the big and the little Napoleon — who both waged war for 
aggression, and both caused the temporary prostration of France at 
enormous cost in treasure and life. And for what? Vain glory ! 

And so-called responsible government, where there is a crown or 
life tenure, Avith a right of succession, and an aristocracy with personal 
prerogatives and class privileges, is a " counterfeit presentment" of 
constitutional power, because it represents only a portion of the people 
ruled, and where all are not represented the rights of the unrepre- 
sented are usurped. 

In Europe, France and Switzerland excepted, the masses, deprived 
of the exercise of rights essential to free . and equal government, are 
graduated in the scale of life farther below their oppressors, who rule 
over them, than they are marked above the flocks and herds, not- 
withstanding that, in the order of nature, the prince and the peasant 
die by the same process — dissolve into common dust — and go to judg- 
ment together on their merits. 



29 

The American citizen, from the political level on which the people 
stand, may mount the winding stair of promotion to its topmost step, 
and there elevated wield the presidency of the United States ; but at 
the end of his term he descends from his high ofSce of human great- 
ness, and, having witnessed the inauguration of his legal successor, 
quietly resumes his citizenship, without a pension or other reward 
than the affections of a constituency faithfully served, and which he 
reciprocates and is grateful for. 

In a province where the subject owes allegiance to a foreign power, 
there is a condition of dependence not congenial to manhood aspira- 
tions for distinction and progress. And it is called "recruiting the 
aristocracy from the ranks," when a commoner, no matter for what 
reason, is given a title to distinguish him from his fellows. But pre- 
fixion and suflBxion are dropped from the immortal names best known 
throughout the world, as, for mstance, " George Washington," who was 
commander-in-chief of the armies during the revolution, and the first 
President of the United States. The world identifies indelible names 
with indelible deeds, and does not cite titles when it quotes heroes and 
benefactors. Why, then, are titles made inheritances in kingdoms? 
Because they represent civil prerogatives and social distinctions, re- 
served from the people despoiled of their rights ! The unrest of the 
people makes the dynasties of the Old World shake like a cradle on 
rockers. And for a cause of the prevailing unrest look at the inequali- 
ties in the condition of the masses, oppressed with national debts, 
standing armies, heavy taxes and poor pay for hard work. Intellec- 
tual superiority, where not bound or bottled, will assert itself, compel 
recognition, and command acceptation and admiration, too, if its ten- 
dencies be sympathetic and patriotic. Cavour, Thiers and Bismarck 
are three illustrious examples of individual influence in national coun- 
cils in recent times. 

Reigning houses in Europe do not abound in ideas, and their cost 
as establishments is not alone in disproportion to their availability to 
the state, but is equally in disproportion to the capacity of the people 
to pay. Retrenchment which begins by reducing the compensation 
of the lowliest, whose per diem is least, is false economy ; for as prices 
go down, the purchasing power of the dollar goes up. Hence, those 
who escape reduction of salary by the year are benefited by the mis- 
fortunes of those who suffer reduction of compensation per day and 
hour. 

Contrast the revenues of the royal family of Great Britain from the 
national treasury and other sources, with the pay-roll of all the opera- 
tives in the " black country" of Lancashire, and the cost of royalty, 
with its immunities and impunities, would be apparent. 



30 

In the United States abuses crop out in the newspapers, and the 
delinquent is discussed and retired on the black list. 

In Great Britain the consequences of abuses are visited on the 
struggling workingman, who is the bottom rock in a social system 
which has more degrees and gradations than there are formations in 
the stratification exposed in a shaft, from the surface of the ground to 
the bottom of a deep mine. 

In the United States the avenues of preferment are as numerous 
and as open as the public roads, to the honors of station and the prizes 
of fortune. And herein America is utterly unlike Great Britain, 
where there are laws of primogeniture and entail, and a nobility titled 
by patent right, like devices in the mechanic arts. Hence, subjects in 
the over-peopled countries of Europe (particularly parents of chil- 
dren), who look abroad over the earth in search of fields wherein 
opportunities invite enterprise and industry, are fortunate if they 
elect to train for citizenship of the United States, where the Celtic 
and Teutonic branches of the Caucasian race are conglomerated in a 
new type of advanced humanity, builders of States in a cemented Union 
which has a base broad as the continent and a roof higher than the 
clouds. 

Into this Union, Alaska and the Aleutian Islands, acquired from 
Russia in 1867 — an acquisition geographically strategic and politically 
significant — was the admission of latest date. 

The admission of Manitoba and British Columbia will follow, be- 
cause in the Dominion they insulate Alaska from its sisters, and are 
in political association — not with neighbors next door, with whom 
alliance would be the result of natural laws — but with distant rela- 
tions, through unhappy contract into which they were inveigled when 
too weak to resist persuasion. 

The retrocession of the territory ceded to Great Britain by the 
treaty of June 15, 1846, prior to which it had been avowed by the 
Polk administration that the title of the United States to the Russian 
line at 54° 40' was "clear and unquestionable," will quicken a Pacific 
coast province into a Pacific coast State, and give the Strait of Juan 
de Fuca rank and consequence with the Golden Gate of San Fran- 
cisco. 

And Manitoba, separated from the province of Ontario by a tem- 
porary boundary line from the north side of Minnesota to the south 
end of James Bay, will no longer be in solitude, cold as its ice and 
cheerless as its north wind, for annexation will do for Manitoba what 
annexation did for Texas, as witness : 



31 

Population of Texas, census of 1870, . . 818,579 

States of Mexico on the Rio Grande river : 
Population of Tamaulipas, . . . 108,514 
Population of Coahuila, . . . 67,691 
Population of Chihuahua, . . . 179,971 
Total as per report of commission from 
Mexico to Philadelphia Centennial 
Exhibition, .... 356,176 



Texas in excess of three Mexican border states, 462,403 

As a state of Mexico, Texas would have remained undeveloped, 
exactly as Manitoba has remained undeveloped under British juris- 
diction, notwithstanding the attempts made to colonize it ; for Texas 
was discovered by La Salle in 1580, and Manitoba, too, is venerable, 
the Hudson Bay Company's charter bearing date 1670 — eleven years 
before Penn founded Pennsylvania — and the Serlick settlement on 
the Red River of the North was visited by Lord Serlick with a mil- 
itary escort in 1816, at which time Indiana was a border State and 
Illinois a Territory, 

Mineral discovery, agricultural development, material progress, 
and widespread prosperity, have added State after State to the Amer- 
ican Union in rapid succession, meanwhile that British territory north 
of the forty-ninth parallel, and Mexican territory south of the Rio 
Grande river, is still most of it wilderness, though explored before 
the thirteen British colonies became the thirteen original American 
States of the Union since made continental, and which now contains 
thirty-eight States and eleven Territories. 

Truly this grand result is a glowing credit to free institutions, 
which tolerate no patent political classes, but treat all citizens polit- 
ically alike ; nowhere else are opportunities so abundant, nor is suc- 
cess so frequently attained by individuals endowed with mental gifts 
and moral worth, and who study for success with honest zeal and 
manly purpose, never wavering in fidelity to the Testament, the Con- 
stitution, or the common weal. The political creed of the American 
citizen is : Allegiance to God, the sole sovereign in nature, and of 
whom an earthly sovereign is a poor counterfeit, a mite in matter ; 
faith in Christ, but not in crowns ; duty to self with minimum selfish- 
ness ; fidelity to the Republic, which is a panoply over North Amer- 
ica studded with States that glow in the political firmament like stars 
in the azure arch beneath the spirit world of heaven overhead. 



82 



CHAPTER IV. 

The basin of Lake Winnipeg is drained by rivers which flow down 
from the west, south and east, including the Red River of the North, 
that spreads its sources and afiluents over large portions of Minnesota 
and Dakota, there interlocking on Ioav water-sheds with tributaries of 
the Missouri and the Mississippi ; and also including the Saskatche- 
wan, whose headwaters are among the fountains of the Columbia River 
in the Rocky Mountains. 

The area of Lake Winnipeg basin is 360,000 square miles, eight 
times the size of the State of New York, and seventy per cent, larger 
than the basin of the Ohio River from its source in Pennsylvania to 
where it disembogues in the Mississippi River at Cairo in Illinois, a 
distance of 1265 miles. 

Lake Winnipeg basin, moreover, contains the cultivable British 
territory, avaihible for agriculture, between the watershed near Lake 
Superior and the Rocky Mountains. To be sure, the fur-trader may 
penetrate farther north into the walrus region — which ought to be 
called the province of Walrusia, or reindeer reservation — but the 
farmer will not accompany him Avith his plough, for frozen ground is 
not arable where the sun in summer only thaws the surface of the 
earth and Flora pays short visits to her wild flowers. 

In the early days of American discovery, France colonized a strip 
of territory from the mouth of the St. Lawrence via the lakes and 
the Ohio to the mouth of the Mississippi. And France first estab- 
lished forts on the inland sea afterwards called Hudson Bay ; but the 
fortune of war deprived France of Canada, and subsequently France 
sold Louisiana to the United States, thereby preventing its possible 
conquest and occupation by a rival European power, and assuring to 
its inhabitants a destiny identical with the Mississippi valley States. 
In this transaction, which occurred in 1803, Napoleon, then Consul 
for life, exhibited both foresight and wisdom ; for, had France been 
dispossessed of Louisiana by the conqueror of Canada, the trespass 
would have irritated the American people and provoked a war, because 
self-preservation, to say nothing of "manifest destiny," made it clear 
that the whole of the Mississippi basin should be in and of the Union. 
The battle of New Orleans, fought by General Andrew Jackson, Jan- 
uary 8, 1815, is a record of what the West will do to keep the Missis- 
sippi basin intact and tight, to hold together the States within it for 
mutual protection and a common aim, these love-bound States mean- 
time serving as political models for imitation by colonies subjected to 
foreign jurisdiction and slower growth. 



33 

The American citizen is a new graft on the Caucasian tree ; the 
British subject is a transplant that will not bear British fruit in 
American soil, for nativit}'' in the Republic is nationality, whereas 
the colonial condition is political bondage ; nor can an intelligent, 
free-will native of France, Ireland, Germany, Holland, Italy, Bel- 
gium, Russia, Austria, Sweden, Denmark or Spain stay in a Cana- 
dian province and owe allegiance to England afar oif, when he can 
move into a near-by State and become a citizen of the American 
Republic, where political equality dwells, and immigrants can thrive 
and be happy in their own homesteads. 

In Manitoba no man can shut his optic nor his mental eye to the 
fact that the outlook south down the Mississippi is brighter and 
warmer and more genial than east down the St. Lawrence, to where 
icebergs float in fleets, fog-banks envelop the coasts, and the inhabit- 
ants, in compliment to the climate, are called "blue-noses." 

Manitoba, therefore, will evolve out of a province into a State, as 
Texas did, and so illustrate the doctrine of evolution applied to politi- 
'cal institutions, and as demonstrated in Louisiana in 1803, Florida 
in 1819, Texas in 1846, California in 1848, and Alaska in 1867, all 
acquisitions surpassing assessment or valuation, all evolutions since 
the revolution of the thirteen colonies into thirteen States, the father- 
land of the twenty-five additional States admitted into the Union, 
east of the Hudson River and west of the Allegheny Mountain. 

As a maritime State on the Hudson Bay (Middle Sea), Manitoba 
will not be unlike the maritime State of Louisiana on the Gulf of 
Mexico ; for as New Orleans has communication with Europe via 
Florida Strait, so will the principal city of Manitoba, through a sea- 
port in Manitoba on Hudson Bay, or in Ontario on James Bay, have 
communication with Europe via Hudson Strait, when open to naviga- 
tion the same as the St. Lawrence, after the annual thaw which ends 
the embargo of inevitable ice. 

In the organization of the Dominion of Canada, the province of 
Ontario in 18G7 had assigned to it that portion of Canada included 
prior thereto in the province of Upper Canada. And Upper Canada 
ended on the west where the Hudson Bay Company's territory com- 
menced on the east, to wit, at the Kaministiqua River, at the mouth 
of which is Fort William, Thunder Bay, Lake Superior. The Hud- 
son Bay Company, whose charter, granted in 1670, expired in 1859, 
was bought out and succeeded by the Dominion of Canada. But 
Ontario claimed that its territory extended to the Rocky Mountains, 
if not to the Pacific Ocean, and a boundary commission was appointed 
to arbitrate between the Dominion of Canada and the Province of 
Ontario. The award of the arbitrators is dated August 3, 1878. 
3 



34 

The new 'boundary established by the commission leaves James Bay 
at the mouth of the Albany River, thence up the said river and via 
Lake St. Joseph, thence to the headwaters of the English River, and 
thence westerly to a meridional line drawn from the most northwesterly 
angle of the Lake of the Woods, and thence south to the national 
boundary. This decision cuts into Manitoba and extends Ontario 
about two hundred miles west of its original limitation. What use 
Ontario will make of its acquisition time will unfold. Manitoba, 
hovvever, will very soon enjoy unbroken rail communication between 
Winnipeg and St. Paul via St. Vincent, opposite Pembina. And the 
exclusion of Manitoba from its frontage on Lake Superior at Thunder 
Bay, and thence to Pigeon River at the Minnesota line, will tend to 
identify Manitoba more and'more with Minnesota and the Mississippi 
valley. Not an inch of Manitoba territory is left in the basin of 
Lake Superior ; but, on the contrary, Ontario's new boundary line 
runs along the west, side of the watershed between Lake Superior and 
Winnipeg, completely insuhiting Manitoba from Lake Superior. 

The State of Pennsylvania was not content to continue insulated 
from Lake Erie, and purchased territory on Lake Erie whereby it 
acquired a lake harbor at Erie City. Manitoba had territory and 
harbors on Lake Superior, but Manitoba has been this present year 
deprived of its Lake Superior frontier, to aggrandize Ontario ! True, 
Manitoba still has Duluth in Minnesota for an objective point on Lake 
Superior, instead of a landing place on Thunder Bay in Ontario. 
Nevertheless, it was unkind to drive Manitoba out of the St. Law- 
rence basin, which includes Lake Superior and its affluents, to extend 
Ontario into the Winnipeg basin, even to the " most northwesterly 
angle of the Lake of the Woods," covering a large area of land, and 
lakes, and rivers, which constitute portions of the Winnipeg system of 
water navigation. In this diplomatic adjustment of boundary line 
Manitoba is the sufferer ; and if Manitoba was previously distrusted 
at Ottawa, and therefore in precaution against possible future move- 
ments in the West, which returns its rainfall to the sea through the 
Mississippi and Nelson Rivers, the Province of Ontario was extended 
over portages, rivers and lakes to the Winnipeg River, the loyalty of 
Manitoba to Ottawa and royalty will hardly be increased by its sever- 
ance and expulsion from the St. Lawrence basin, between Pigeon 
River and Thunder Bay ; for now Manitoba, cut off from Lake 
Superior by the new frontier of Ontario, is in complete identification 
with Minnesota, which has a Mississippi River harbor at St. Paul, 
a Lake Superior harbor at Duluth, and railways in all directions. 

Michigan and Wisconsin as well as Minnesota may look to James 
Bay for an additional outlet to the ocean ; and if Ontario demur to 



right of way from the north shore of Lake Superior to James Bay, 
Ontario cannot expect to enjoy unlimited facilities in Michigan, to 
reach Chicago. Are not Dominion interests promoted by the ferry 
across Lake Michigan, between Milwaukee and Grand Haven, by the 
ferry across Detroit River, between Detroit and Windsor, and by the 
ferry across the Strait of St. Clair, between Port Huron and Sarnia? 
And when necessity or convenience shall require ferry accommoda- 
tions between the south shore of Lake Superior, occupied jointly by 
Michigan and Wisconsin, and the north shore, all in Ontario, to 
facilitate communication with James Bay, and with Europe via 
Hudson Strait, will Ontario or the Dominion grant the necessary 
legislation for a lake ferry and a portage railway, or venture to with- 
hold it ? 

Great Britain is not satisfied with the open sea route to India via 
the Cape of Good Hope, but fusses and blusters about the Suez 
Canal, as if anybody intended to shut it ; and about the Euphrates 
valley, as if anybody not British intended to build a railroad in it, 
when there is better ground for a shorter route to India, from Paris, 
Berlin, and St. Petersburg, north of the Black Sea ! 

The West, which comprises the basin of the Mississippi River and 
the basins of the lakes west of Niagara Falls, will also comprise the 
basin of Nelson River; and then the West will cover and include all 
the territory between the salt waters in the Gulf of Mexico and Hud- 
son Bay, and from the Allegheny Mountain, where the Atlantic 
slope ends, to the Rocky Mountains, where the Pacific slope begins. 
There is only one West in North America, and that has mountain 
watersheds on the east and west parallel with the two oceans, and 
reservoirs of seawater on the north and south. 

Hudson Bay will be made available for a distributing basin in 
summer time. Compared with Hudson Strait the St. Lawrence route 
through Quebec and Ontario is a sinuous way to the sea, from the 
wheat belt in the West, to which England is indebted for much of its 
bread, as it is likewise indebted to the Union for meat to eat and 
cotton to wear. Great Britain, with its entailed estates and areas of 
cultivable land reserved from cultivation, and its titled aristocracy to 
support in luxury, is a heavy buyer of breadstuff's. 

Among the nations where government is wise and domestic policy 
is far-sighted, it is the aim of each to manipulate its own ores and 
fibrous productions into manufactures for consumption and exporta- 
tion, a discriminating practice which will tend to modify foreign com- 
merce into intertrade in surplus commodities ; for a nation will not 
continue to pay out for labor, in another land, money which may be 
distributed for labor at home. The machine-man is on his travels, 



36 

busy at every World's Fair, and the distribution of labor on a new 
basis, not British, is his fjrand mission. 

The original thirteen States which cut the colonial knot to terminate 
allegiance to Great Britain, and which, after winning with the sword 
the title of " free and independent States," established the Union 
under a Constitution framed with rare wisdom and prophetic adapta- 
tion to human wants, were all in a row along the Atlantic coast, east 
of Florida, afterwards acquired from Spain. Now, the Union has an 
ocean boundary west as Avell as east, and a gulf border on its south 
side; but the Union also needs Hudson Bay, i. e.. Middle Sea, for an 
Atlantic dock, to facilitate and cheapen intercourse and intertrade 
between Europe and the Mississippi, the Rocky Mountains and the 
Pacific States, Manitoba and British Columbia, as States of the Union, 
likewise inclusive. Then, the Union will have two seas for boundary 
docks, and axis ends midway between its two ocean shores ; and from 
its two principal inland cities, Chicago and St. Louis, marts of rapid 
and vigorous growth, straight lines drawn to the four cardinal points 
will all intersect tidewaters, open to free navigation around the world. 

When head winds delayed the mariner, and blew his ship off its 
course, long voyages, as living persons can testify, were tedious under- 
takings; but, nowadays, the steamship runs to schedule time, on paths 
across the waters, as the locomotive engine runs to schedule on rail- 
ways overland, whereby the time-table and the time-piece regulate the 
affairs of foreign trade conducted under treaties; and so, in a prac- 
tical dollar sense, apart from tlie more elevating intellectualities and 
sublimer divinities of the theme, the intertrade movement is but an 
international show held in a single spot, as in Fairmount Park, Phila- 
delphia, in 1876, magnified and expanded to the true areas of the 
nations and the true quantities and values of the import and export 
trade over the whole earth. 

And the nations that were separated by distances in miles, beset 
with difiiculties which delayed transportation and increased its cost, 
can, in these times, advanced into the interior of civilization, deliver 
the commodities of intertrade by sure, swift and cheap conveyance, 
on contracts and messages passed through submarine cables and over- 
land wires that "put a girdle round about the earth" in considerably 
less than Puck's minimum of "forty minutes." 

Although the fortune of war deprived Great Britain of thirteen 
colonies, which became thirteen States, containing 318,572 square 
miles of surface, since expanded into thirty-eight States and eleven 
Territories, Great Britain plans and builds railways to keep the pro- 
vinces of the Dominion together with iron bands, as the staves of a 
barrel are held together with iron hoops ; and to make a spread of 



37 

empire on paper, Great Britain claims jurisdiction underneath the 
Aurora Borealis even to the North Pole, not yet visited. 

Well, as France still retains St. Pierre and Miquelon Islands, near 
Newfoundland, notwithstanding that Canada was confirmed to Great 
Britain by treaty, signed in 1763, so Great Britain might retain the 
Queen Charlotte Islands, in the Pacific Ocean, north of Vancouver 
Island, after the temporary boundary fence from Lake Superior to 
the Pacific Ocean, and from 54°40' to Demarkation Point in Beaufort 
Bay, shall have been modified into a partition with communicating 
doors between compartments, for Alaska the Russian-born Territory, 
and its neighbors also adopted into the Union family. 

As Eastern Texas has prospered on cotton, so may Southern Mani- 
toba prosper on wheat ; but the development of Texas succeeded its 
admission into the Union, and Manitoba must ask to come in, and get 
in like Texas did, before it can attract immigration as Minnesota and 
Dakota do, alongside Manitoba, but inside the Union. 

Serlick, on Red Riv^r, where the Canada Pacific Railway crosses 
and the Pembina branch begins, Moorhead, on Red River, where the 
Northern Pacific Railroad crosses, Omaha, on the Missouri River, 
where the Union Pacific Railroad technically ends, and Galveston, the 
principal seaport of Texas, distinguished for its export of cotton bales, 
are all on or near the same degree of longitude. Omaha, too, is mid- 
way between the mouth of Nelson River, in Hudson Bay, and the 
mouth of the Rio Grande, in the Gulf of Mexico. And the distance 
from Omaha to San Francisco is shorter than the distance from 
Omaha to Halifax. 

From Port Moody, the terminus of the Canada Pacific Railway, on 
Burrard Inlet, mouth of Frazer River, to Port Nelson, Hudson Bay, 
the distance is shorter than from Port Nelson to Halifax. And as a 
harbor can be provided on a river emptying into Hudson Bay, if not 
on the Nelson, certainly on the Churchill River, then the trunk-line 
portage railway between the Pacific waters in or near Frazer River 
and a river port west of and accessible from Hudson Bay will, of 
course, be shortened correspondingly. 

Consider a route from Europe to San Francisco, the Pacific States, 
and Asia, via Hudson Strait and Juan de Fuca Strait, with a portage 
railway between Frazer River and Hudson Bay, versus the Canada 
Pacific Railway via Ottawa to seawater and winter ice in the St. 
Lawrence. 

The Hudson Bay Company throughout its long career sent its ships 
into Hudson Bay, and established numerous forts and fur factories on 
its shores. As to falls and cataracts in Manitoba, recall the condition 
of the St. Lawrence route between Port Colbourne and Montreal before 



38 

• 

the Welland and St. Lawrence Canals provided artificial navigation 
from Lake Erie and Lake Ontario to tidewater in Canada. 

But whatever artificial works may be needed ought to be provided, 
to improve a river emptying into Hudson Bay, to facilitate the tran- 
shipment of commodities to and from Hudson Bay, which, in verity, 
is a sea, and the Pacific coast and intermediate points ; and also to 
improve a river emptying into James Bay, or a harbor on James Bay, 
to facilitate the transhipment of commodities carried to and from the 
sea in James Bay and the Mississippi valley States; for where freight 
is bulky and weighty it is a consideration to shorten overland distance 
to tidewater navigation, because once on tidewater the way is open to 
destinations along the coast and across the ocean, by the cheapest 
known mode of transportation. 

Meditate the tonnage between Chicago, Milwaukee and other lake 
ports and New York city, via the Erie Canal and the Hudson River 
tideway. Then count the meshes and the miles in the network of iron 
track from the Atlantic and Gulf ports from Galveston to Portland, 
inland and over the interior to cities on the lakes, from Oswego to 
Duluth. Lastly, extend this connected network, most of it of the 
standard 4 feet 8A inches gauge, northward to James Bay and Hud- 
son Bay, and westward to the Pacific Ocean. Assuredly from Mani- 
toba the outlook is broader and brighter southward and westward, 
than eastward via the Canada Pacific Railway, considered as a route 
to Montreal in summer, and to Halifax in winter, not to be inter- 
sected in Manitoba by cross-cut railway portages to Hudson Sea and 
James Bay ! 

The Canada Grand Trunk Railway, a rate-cutting competitor for 
Boston and Chicago traffic, in 1877 received per ton per mile, for 
freight carried, the average of only eight mills, or eight-tenths of one 
cent; and the travel over the Canada Grand Trunk, in 1877, averaged 
only fifty-eight passengers per train. Why? Because its revenue 
(profit unconsidered) would be still less than it is if its operations were 
restricted to the Dominion and Maine, and it had no ally in Vermont 
and Massachusetts. 

And so, Manitoba, to prosper, must intertrade south as well as 
west; for with the eastern provinces of the Dominion it Avill have 
less intercourse and lighter intertrade than with the Western States 
of the Union, when its near-by bays, on which it abuts, shall have 
been made available for communication, via salt water, with the com- 
mercial world, in summer time. 



39 



CHAPTER V. 

The treaty with Great Britain, signed at Washington May 8, 1871, 
for arbitration of the Alabama Claims, Fishery Question, the San 
Juan boundary, &c., a treaty in the negotiation of which Hamilton 
Fish, Secretary of State, was weighed, measured, and outwitted by 
his diplomatic adversary, and out of which grave mistake of President 
Grant's administration in forfeiting a "golden opportunity" has 
grown a grievance on the Fishery Question to be redressed hereafter, 
provides that : 

"The navigation of the rivers Yukon, Porcupine, and Stikine, 
from, to and into the sea, shall forever remain free and open for the 
purposes of commerce, to the subjects of her Britannic Majesty and 
to the citizens of the United States." 

The Porcupine River is a branch of the Yukon River, which 
empties into the Behring Sea north of the Aleutian peninsula, and 
the Stikine River empties into the Pacific Ocean in the vicinity of 
Sitka. 

When Hamilton Fish, Secretary of State, in 1871, made the rivers 
of Alaska " free and open" to British subjects, why did he not stipu- 
late that Frazer River in British Columbia, and the Red River of the 
North, and Lake Winnipeg and the rivers to it from the west, and the 
river from it to Hudson Bay, should be "free and open" to citizens 
of the United States ? 

The omission of the Red River of the North, which is four parts 
in Minnesota to one part in Manitoba, is extraordinary ; and to sup- 
pose a blunder equivalent to it, one must imagine Austria, which pours 
its waters into the Danube, far above its mouths, omitted from treaties 
regulating its navigation to the Black Sea ! 

Hudson Bay is Middle Sea, and Minnesota and Dakota stand to it, 
via the Red River of the North, which empties into it under another 
name that does not chano-e its nature or its course, as Austria and 
Servia stand to the Black Sea via the Danube, which has different 
names for its several mouths. 

President Grant's administration had a national grievance proved 
against Great Britain, and reparation or war was the alternative ; and 
yet Secretary Fish, in a negotiation to prescribe the measure and 
method of satisfaction — keep this in mind — permitted the insidious 
and ever-scheming enemy of his country (that aided rebellion in under- 
hand ways and promoted piracy with English-built Alabamas, till 
Amerrcan ships were almost swept from the seas and Great Britain 
became the monopolist of the ocean-carrying trade) to arbitrate, that 
is, to liquidate an injury to the United States which continues to inure 



40 

to the advantage of Great Britain through its ocean ships, with a 
money consideration to be ascertained by a throw of dice or shuffle of 
cards — for what is arbitration but a game of chance, especially where 
a majority of the commissioners owe their nomination to foreign 
powers ? 

True, the San Juan Island arbitration resulted in favor of the 
United States by the decision of Frederick William I., Emperor of 
Germany, October 21, 1872. But the British claim to the island of 
San Juan under a forced interpretation of the treaty of June 15, 1846, , 
was an act of British finesse and attempted bluff, to which the fitting 
* answer would have been a notice that, after a date given, joint mili- 
tary occupation should cease, and that thereafter the army of the 
United States would occupy San Juan Island. 

How the British intrigued at Berlin in 1872, and how Emperor 
William was beset to decide in favor of Great Britain, is matter of 
history. And it is to the impartiality of Emperor William of Ger- 
many, not to the diplomacy of Hamilton Fish, that the people of the 
United States are indebted for the possession of the strategic island 
of San Juan, acquired by treaty dated June 15, 1846, imperilled by 
arbitration authorized by treaty dated May 8, 1871. 

The Halifax Fishery award, however, of $5,500,000, made Novem- 
ber 22, 1877, by Maurice Delfosse, Belgian Minister at Washington, 
and Alexander T. Gait, appointee of her Britannic Majesty, for fish- 
ing privileges only worth a license to fish, not a ransom for fish caught 
in the saltwater highway — as brigands ransom tourists captured on 
the stage-travelled highways in Italy and Greece — will doubtless put a 
quietus on the international arbitration humbug, as between America 
and Europe. Ensign H. Kellogg was Commissioner for the United 
States, outvoted at Halifax. 

The Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, distributed European territory 
and population, and exercised other powers, with as little remorse and 
not more penitence than a banditti distributes its spoils, made up of 
the proceeds of rapine on the highway and hearthstone. 

France was prostrated and exhausted, a Bourbon was on its throne, 
and Napoleon had met his fate at Waterloo ; so there was no military 
Satan abroad to make Europe afraid ; but that very fact, for which 
diplomacy should have been thankful, made dynastic parties greedy, 
covetous and cruel. The Vienna Congress served the devil best, and 
set portions of Europe back (not including Austria and England) a 
period of time equivalent to two generations of men. And diplomacy 
did that fell work when war was at an end. 

Turn, too, to the 1878 Congress of Berlin. The infidel Turk in- 
vaded Christian Europe and captured Adrianople in 1861, Constanti- 



41 

nople in 1453. Turkish rule in Europe has been an outrage on 
humanity, christianized, through centuries of time ; at irregular inter- 
vals the barbarities inflicted on the Christian subjects of the Porte 
have made their fellow- Christians shudder in all lands. And what- 
ever was done to make Turkey relax her grasp on the Christian's 
rights in Europe, is mainly due to Russia. But for Russia the alter- 
native would have been Islamism or massacre long ago. 

After such atrocities as had never been surpassed anywhere (not 
even by the British in India, when, on the suppression of the mutiny 
of 1857, human bodies were discharged from the cannon's mouth), 
Russia, the chief champion of the Christian populations in the Pro- 
vinces of Turkey, declared war against Turkey on the 24th of April, 
1877. This war England could have averted by cooperation with the 
other signatory powers to the Paris treaty of March 30, 1856, but 
England, "perfidious Albion," refused. The treaty of San Stefano, 
dated February 19, 1878, inside of ten months from the declaration 
of war, attests the triumph of the Russian arms, for the Russian 
forces fought their way across the Balkans through the rigors of 
winter, occupied Adrianople, and at San Stefano were at the very 
gates of Constantinople. 

And then it was, after the Turk has been whipped, that British 
bluster broke out ; the British fleet of iron-clads, in violation of the 
treaty of Paris, and against the remonstrance of Turkey, steamed up 
the Dardanelles ; the Parliament of Great Britain voted money, osten- 
sibly for military and naval preparations, with a percentage for sub- 
sidy understood ; for official servitors of impecunious dynasties include 
cheap human chattels, and as a little fuel will raise steam to blow a 
whistle, so will a few dollars raise wind to make a noise. 

A scrap-book made up of official British correspondence and cut- 
tings from the London newspapers, beginning with the Berlin Mem- 
orandum dated May, 1876, which Great Britain refused to sign, and 
which would have averted the war so disastrous to Turkey, by con- 
straining that doomed despotism to grant the concessions asked for 
by the continental powers, would illustrate how the British lion was 
made rampant with imitation anger, till it swallowed an island belong- 
ing to its ally, and so wath Cyprus appeased its hunger; for when 
British hunger is appeased, British pride is satisfied. 

On the 13th June, 1878, a Congress of seven powers — Russia, 
Turkey, Italy, France, Austria, Germany and Great Britain — met at 
Berlin to discuss the treaty of San Stefano and preserve the peace 
with diplomatic chess ; for secret societies and attempted assassina- 
tions had begotten a common dread that a general war might develop 
a new danger in social and political elements, antagonistic to the 



42 

ruling powers represented by the Berlin plenipotentiaries, and which 
might in some places profit by war to promote revolution ; since, 
however powerful a potentate may seem, he must have his people on 
his side, and must conform to public opinion in his action, to assure 
stabilit}^ and justify succession in his line. Moral responsibility is 
inherited at every birth and pervades every life ; and possession and 
power are identical only where the ruler and the ruled are cordial in 
cooperation. Hence ministers are slow to abet war where the people 
are not in accord with the aims of the administration in office, whether 
its chief wears a crown or holds a certificate of election ; unless, 
indeed, where a man commands confidence from belief in his patriot- 
ism and greatness, and even then if he fall short he will fall far, for 
the nation is paramount and the individual must succumb. 

On the 13th July, 1878, after a session of one month, the Berlin 
Congress signed a treaty and adjourned. If it did much, it left more 
undone, for its articles are only temporary trestles where arches of 
enduring masonry are necessary in a permanent way over a crisis 
which will periodically reappear, till the Turk return to Asia, whence 
he came to curse Europe with his false religion and his beastly vices. 

In the Congress of Berlin the course of the ambassador of France 
is incomprehensible, save on the hypothesis that, because France 
under the first Napoleon sought to embarrass and thwart Alexander 
the First, till Moscow consumed his ambitious hopes of colossal empire 
in its ashes, and made him a fugitive from Russia, where his army 
left its bones in evidence of its destruction, therefore : France, wrong 
after the interview of 25th June, 1807, on the raft in the Niemen at 
Tilsit and the occult treaty of Tilsit of 8th July, 1807, wrong in the 
Crimean w^ar of 1854-56, which was conceived and waged to make 
Russia a Baltic state like Sweden, must, to be true to its Russo- 
phobic Avrong-doing, commit a final blunder at Berlin in 1878 ; where, 
after having voted against Russia and with England, it was made 
wise, when too late, with the information that meantime Great Britain 
was pettifogging and shystering for the Turk at Berlin, to play its 
high moral part in the European drama, it had negotiated a secret 
treaty with Turkey for its own aggrandizement in the Mediterranean, 
geographically in Asia, it is true, but politically and commercially, 
and in a naval and military sense, in Europe ; in a place, too, where 
Cyprus under the British flag is a defiance to France, to say nothing 
of Italy and Spain. 

In its foreign diplomacy, in which France Avas preeminent before 
the Buonapartes, France, since its seduction by Great Britain, has 
obviously declined ; and among Britons and pro-Britons it is an opin- 
ion expressed with satisfaction that France has culminated in Euro- 



43 

pean politics, which is understood to imply that Fratice is in its deca- 
dence ; an erroneous opinion, which the Republic, when it ceases to 
repeat old history, and makes new history for Europe and mankind, 
will" take care to eradicate. 

Great Britain distrusts both France and Germany, because Great 
Britain knows and foresees that Belgium and Holland would be val- 
uable acquisitions to France and Germany, inasmuch as they contain 
available harbors on the English Channel and North Sea, which in 
French and German ownership, by partition, would give prestige to 
French and German commerce in the waters of the world. 

As to the morale of European politics — not as professed and prop- 
agated in debates and newspapers in Great Britain, but as practiced 
by Great Britain in its foreign affairs — it will suffice here to quote 
the reported words of Lord Derby in the House of Lords on the 18th 
July, 1878, after Lord Beaconsfield, on his first appearance fresh from 
the Berlin Congress adjourned, had made his statement : 

" Lord Derby generally approved of what had been done in Europe, 
"but he questioned the value of Cyprus, and declared that he quitted 
"the cabinet because he dissented from the decision to seize a naval 
" station in the eastern Mediterranean, consisting of Cyprus and a 
" point on the main land, by a secret expedition from India, without 
"the consent of the Sultan." 

Great Britain's role, as the ally of Turkey, was to cooperate with 
Turkey against mutual enemies, and to cheat Turkey for British pri- 
vate account. But the ofiicial Turk, first soundly thrashed by the 
Russian, and secondly bribed or biased by the Briton, was too thor- 
oughly demoralized to stand on the San Stefano treaty, in which he 
was one of two negotiating parties, or to say "no" to an ally which 
bears and wears the prefix "perfidious" to its "Albion." 

Every impartial observer the world over can foresee that the great 
power of the north, giant Russia, will never cease its efforts till the 
Bosphorus and the Dardanelles are so held and controlled that Rus- 
sia shall have free and unrestricted passage for its commerce through 
the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, as Great 
Britain has for its commerce through the Strait of Gibraltar between 
the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. 

The Mediterranean Sea is to Russia precisely what the Gulf of 
Mexico is to the Mississippi valley. The Baltic Sea is closed by ice 
to navigation in winter, like the American lakes and the Hudson and 
St. Lawrence Rivers ; but the straits to the Mediterranean are open 
throughout the year, like the Mississippi to the Gulf. And as the 
first Napoleon through his Moscow campaign, and the third Napoleon 
through his Crimean campaign, both failed to drive Russia back from 



• 

the Black Sea towards the Baltic, the "manifest destiny" of Russia, 
in the providence of nations, should have made France in 1878 wise 
to prefer the Russians on the Bosphorus and in Constantinople, to 
increase of British jurisdiction in the Mediterranean basin. 

Spain, France, Italy, Austria and Russia are the five principal 
powers which have common interests in Mediterranean navigation, 
whereas Great Britain's interests are mainly in India, and her ambi- 
tion is to dominate the Mediterranean to protect her preferred route 
to the East. France built the Suez Canal across Egypt against the 
opposition and misrepresentation of Great Britain, but subsequently 
France allowed England to acquire part ownership of the Suez Canal. 
And this present year France, in shortsightedness akin to blindness, 
and as if in remembrance of Moscow and forgetfulness of Waterloo, 
cooperated against Russia in a way that aggrandized Austria and 
Great Britain, the two powers which in the Congress of Vienna, 
y^\/^ Iffi^ty-four years ago, impoverished and humiliated France to ag- 
grandize and exalt themselves. 

But the Berlin Congress is over, and to the shame of France, which 
returned home from the Congress of Berlin empty-handed, if not a dupe, 
Great Britain has added Cyprus to its Malta and Gibraltar fortifica- 
tions for its army and navy in the Mediterranean (a Berlin Congress 
made British Lake), where France, Italy, and Spain ought to be 
absolute, but are not ; and where, too, had France and Italy at 
Berlin been wise, they might always have Russia for a safe and sure 
ally, which Great Britain never is, by reason of its shifting policy of 
expediency and interest ; because the Black Sea is no more than an 
affluent of the Mediterranean Sea, whence the Atlantic Ocean is 
reached, as Lake Superior is but an affluent of Lake Erie, whence 
the Atlantic Ocean is reached ; and because, also, Russia at Constan- 
tinople could protect the waterway to the ocean-world. 

The Black Sea and its tributary rivers, which pass their waters 
through the straits via Constantinople, are all within the hydro- 
graphic basin of the Mediterranean Sea, as the Ohio and Missouri 
Valleys are within the hydrographic basin of,^ the Mississippi River ; 
and Constantinople is to Odessa what New Orleans is to St. Louis ; 
for St. Louis can only reach the ocean by natural waterway via New 
Orleans, and Odessa can only reach the ocean by natural waterway 
via Constantinople. And Russia at Constantinople would be no more 
a menace to the Mediterranean powers than is the American Union 
on the Gulf of Mexico a menace to the West India Islands. The 
Russian programme, which Great Britain has magnified into a pan- 
dora box to poison the Mediterranean air with suspicions, in truth 
makes Russia not the threatening enemy but the natural ally of the 



45 

Mediterranean powers, comprising France, Italy, Spain, and Greece; 
Great Britain, the task-master of India, not included. 

To regain Gibraltar is a legitimate aspiration in a heroic Spaniard, 
and Spain has a history to beget patriotism and arouse ambition. And 
what better political purpose Spain can urge than the retrocession of 
Gibraltar, is past our comprehension. 

To guardian the Suez Canal is a legitimate French ambition, for 
France promoted the Suez Canal when Great Britain underrated it, 
and disparaged and opposed it. Over Egypt, too, France should have 
retained the control it had Avhen the Suez Canal was opened, under its 
auspices and through its material aid, and when Great Britain was in 
the background, wondering if the prodigal Khedive would soon sell 
or hypothecate his Suez Canal shares. In truth, France, had it been 
less jealous of Russia and more suspicious of Great Britain, might 
have sustained its appropriate role as the chief Mediterranean power, 
instead of surrendering to Great Britain that proud distinction, 
wrested from France by diplomacy that overreaches and by intrigue 
that undermines. 

But the friends of the Republic of France need not despair nor 
despond, for its diplomacy may be revived and its prestige restored, 
under a progressive President elected by popular vote or its equivalent, 
as in the United States. 

Possibly Great Britain may strive to anticipate France and make 
itself the ally of Russia, for Great Britain is a money power and its 
"interests" are chameleon in colors. But Russia has aims in Asia, 
and can there cause Great Britain tribulation, and so France and 
Italy may yet with Russia consult the "sick man" on his straits. 

What Russia proposed to Great Britain anterior to the Crimean 
war is of record in official correspondence ; and the acquisition of 
Cyprus Island by Great Britain is a testimony of the foresight of the 
Emperor Nicholas, as the fate of the first Napoleon is an evidence 
that the alliance proffered to France by Alexander the First would 
have spared France disaster in the field and loss in treasure and life. 
But the ways of diplomacy are " past finding out" in advance, though 
after events bear the marks of its visitation in scars impossible of 
misinterpretation. For is not the bomb of celestial fire a convincing 
proof when it explodes that electricity is a force in nature ? 

Is not Turkey shattered where riven by the Russian bolts of war 
in European Turkey and Asia Minor ? Is not Turkey shorn of the 
island of Cyprus by its defensive treaty with Great Britain, signed 
June 4, 1878, whereby the latter stipulates to assist Turkey " if any 
attempt shall be made in future time by Russia to take possession of 
any further territories of his Imperial Majesty the Sultan, in Asia " — 



46 

not in Europe, be it noted and observed? And is not Turkey also 
shorn of Bosnia and Herzegovina by the treaty of Berlin, signed 
July 13, 1878, which prescribed that the two provinces named shall 
be occupied and administered by Austria ? Is not the evidence con- 
clusive that Great Britain and Austria cooperated against Russia, 
after its victories in war and its San Stefano peace treaty, to aggran- 
dize themselves at the expense of Turkey ? An orchardist anxious 
to save a tree stripped of some of its branches by a storm in an 
angry wind, does not cut off its remaining sound limbs. And yet, 
Austria and Great Britain, after the tree of Turkey had been trimmed 
with Russia's sword, from its top limbs to the ground, lopped off 
Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Cyprus, leaving the tree of Turkey like a 
Aveeping willow, with branches broken off by a tempest and limbs cut 
away with the axe — the first a consequence of war in the field, the 
latter of craft in the council. 

Dynasties are not governments, crowned heads are not nationalities. 
Public opinion, founded not in prejudice or passion, but in conclusions 
based on reason, is the paramount power. And a dynasty that for- 
feits the confidence of the people it reigns over may be cast overboard 
without injury to the state, as a dead marine may be cast overboard 
by -an admiral without injury to his fleet. Is not the Queen of Eng- 
land an ornamental feather in the scales that weigh political power in 
Great Britain ? Did not the people of France, through their depu- 
ties in the Assembly, make it palpable to an equivocal Republican 
President and to Buonapartists in 1877 that the coup d'etat of Decem- 
ber 2, 1851, is not possible a second time? And if in past time the 
voice of the people was smothered in superstition and ignorance by 
craft and chicanery, in present time " the voice of the people is the 
voice of God," in verity and earthly power. 

The people of France and the people of Italy know and realize that 
their ambassadors to the Berlin Congress of 1878 were as clay in the 
hands of the potters who manipulated that conclave of jugglers, who 
adjourned grave questions and settled only minor matters. 

In the Congress of Berlin the British ambassador, a lord by patent, 
sat with a secret treaty with Turkey in his pocket. In a congress of 
boys, a boy ambassador detected with a secret treaty in his pocket 
under similar circumstances would have been evicted for turpitude 
and disgraced among boys. But the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78 
is of record, and the San Stefano treaty is a historical milestone in 
the road from Moscow to Constantinople, Russia's ultimate destina- 
tion, to which she directed her aims when the Black Sea was a Turkish 
lake, and the Crimea Turkish territory, as the American Republic 
looked hopefully and expectantly down the Mississippi River to the 



47 

Gulf of Mexico, when Louisiana belonged to France and Florida to 
Spain. Happily for the United States only one foreign power, Great 
Britain, was jealous of its acquisitions. But unhappily for Russia, 
which is a creditor nation by great odds in its account with other 
nations of help rendered and received, it has enemies and jealous 
neighbors Avho begrudge it what it wins, and plot to withhold from it 
what it deserves and will work on to achieve, for the betterment of 
Christian Europe. 

Notwithstanding the jealousy of its enemies and neighbors, however, 
Russia, by the San Stefano treaty of 1878, even as modified by the 
Berlin Congress, changed the map of Europe ; for it made Servia, 
Montenegro, and Roumania independent nationalities. True, Rou- 
mania showed its unworthiness of independence by its baseness to its 
benefactor; but nevertheless, Roumania is wrested finally from Turkey, 
and if portioned away hereafter so much the better, for on its inhabit- 
ants is imposed an imported prince impotent to prevent the retroces- 
sion of Bessarabia to Russia, or block the Russian's Avay to Constan- 
tinople. Servia is a national nut which diplomacy cannot crack to 
divide its kernel ; and Montenegro is a star state, not a mould candle 
to be extinguished with Austrian or British snuffers. In a word, 
there are Christian fruits of wars past and germinating seeds of wars 
to come, on the Black, the ^gean, the Adriatic, and the Mediterra- 
nean Seas, which will restore to Christian rule its ancient sites, and 
make the Mediterranean a distributing basin under rights common to 
all the nations that have jaossessions within it, from Gibraltar to 
Odessa and the forks of the Danube. 



CHAPTERVL 

In the Berlin Congress, which met June 13th, and adjourned 
July 13, 1878 — a Congress wherein Italy and France fell short of 
the opportunity and the occasion — Russia did not have the hearty 
cooperation of a single power to assist it to maintain the concessions 
to the Christians it had won in war and secured by treaty. On the 
contrary, the powers present appeared to make common cause to 
harass Russia to the limit imposed by that victor on its capacity for 
endurance, to preserve the peace of Europe ; for a war that, at its 
outbreak, would include Russia, Turkey, Great Britain, Austria, Ser- 
via, Montenegro and Roumania, would soon involve Italy and Greece 
and Germany and France, and so become general throughout Europe, 



48 

where the embers of revolution were aglow, ready to blaze, in the 
summer of 1878. And against oppressed peoples roused to arms, the 
network of dynastic government is but as a spider-web. Peoples in 
anger are forces in nature, resistless as lightning, hurricane and flood. 

Nor was Great Britain, with all its diplomatic brag and newspaper 
bluster, its parliamentary buncombe and its noisy preparation for war, 
including its dramatic transport of troops from India to Malta — a 
movement which included a hint to Italy and France— -anxious for 
actual hostilities ; because British ships in the carrying trade around the 
world would have afforded fat prizes to fast-going Alabamas incorporated 
into the Russian navy ; for, clear as blue sky at noon-time, in sun- 
shine, is the fact that, in a war between Russia and Great Britain, 
Russian ships of the Alabama style will scour the seas and make 
prizes of merchant ships. Great Britain breaks treaties and ignores 
treaties; and, as " curses come home to roost," Great Britain will 
suffer the consequence of her own practice, when she plotted the 
destruction of American commerce, with English-built Alabamas, 
manned with English crews, to prey on the commerce of the United 
States. England's aim was to sever the American Union, make a 
commercial ally of the cotton Confederacy, and strip the North of its 
ships on the seas, so that England could command the ocean-carrying 
trade of both sections. In the war of the Rebellion, England — aboli- 
tion England — cared as little for the fact that human slavery, against 
which it had long kept up a loud outcry, was the basis of the Southern 
Confederacy it gave aid to in every conceivable surreptitious way, as 
England, in the war between Russia and Turkey, cared for the fact 
that the issue involved Christian emancipation from Mahometan ser- 
vitude. At Berlin, Great Britain intrigued to divide the Bulgaria 
created by the treaty of San Stefano, so that Turkey might receive 
back Christian subjects released from its rule by Russia, and thereby 
prolong its stay in Europe, where it is a trespasser. 

Great Britain has party cries, but no political principles. In its 
cooperative sympathy with the Southern Confederacy it forswore its 
moral convictions against human slavery and belied its loud-mouthed 
professions of philanthropy for the African in bondage. In its zeal 
for Turkey, so that for service in Bulgaria it might take pay in Cyprus, 
Great Britain, at Berlin, plotted and intrigued against. the followers 
of Christ, in Bulgaria, to delay their deliverance from the followers 
of Mahomet, in Constantinople! 

On the stage an actor can change his part according as he may be 
cast — in one play a patriot, in another play an apostate — because it 
is his profession to "hold the mirror up to nature" in his imitations, 
of the characters in his text, from night to night. But nations are 



49 

aggregations of individuals, and character does not consist of words 
spoken of a man, for that is reputation — a thing of newspaper manu- 
facture — but is the product of a life, public and private. Character 
is pure metal, whereas reputation may be made up of alloys that swell 
size, but do not augment value. Thus, when, for illustration, the 
London Times says so and so of a British politician, its praise exalts 
and its censure depreciates reputation ; but it does not affect char- 
acter, for that is made up not of words, which are wind, but of deeds, 
which are weights and measures. Hence, Great Britain, long ago 
called "Perfidious Albion," is perfidious still, because, whilst it pro- 
fesses moral principles, it plays unworthy tricks for shop-keeper and 
money-lender ends. In the drama of progress, in the interest of 
civilization, in the last hundred years. Great Britain is immeasurably 
behind Russia : for Russia is not a rover, seizing here and there, but 
a progressionist, that pushes out its frontiers in the domains of anti- 
Christ, to spread civilization and develop the industries and the arts. 
Hence, Russia is a growing power, with a destiny to fulfill, whereas 
Great Britain is a moneyed power that makes the credit side of its 
profit and loss account paramount to its moral principles and religious 
professions. Russia abolished serfage, and Avill make other reforms as 
bold, after it secures peace on lasting terms. 

Great Britain had opportunity to succor Turkey as an ally and 
co-belligerent, when Plevna surrendered and before the Russians had 
crossed the Balkans ; and prior to the Russian occupation of Sophia 
and Adrianople, British and Austrian. cooperation might have checked 
the progress of Russia, and so preserved Turkey nominally intact in 
Europe, leaving it to make concessions only to public opinion in 
matters of administration, without surrender of territory; for, rather 
than see the Christian Greek Church re-established in Constantinople, 
Catholic Austria and Protestant England would plot against Russia, 
and repeat the treachery of Judas to Jesus Christ. The over-fed 
priest-politician and the over-paid rector-politician are unworthy fol- 
lowers of the Saviour and His apostles ; for, with the politician in 
robes it is self, self, self, whereas Avith the apostles it was everything 
for the cause of the Son of God on the earth, in a kingdom founded 
in unselfish sacrifice for the common good of mankind. 

But Great Britain, the miscellaneous money-lender, whether for 
account of heaven or hell, and the promiscuous dealer in the neces- 
saries of life and the poisons of illicit commerce, let perish the oppor- 
tunity which tarried at Plevna and invited interference; and, in 
selfishness, looked on the sanguinary strife till Turkey was crushed 
. and the San Stefano treaty had made peace between the belligerents. 
And by the San Stefano treaty between Russia and Turkey, the inde- 
4 



50 

pendence of Servia (God bless Servia !) and Montenegro (God bless 
Montenegro!), and Roumania the treacherous, was secured: and these 
three new independent nationalities were, by the Russian-Turkey 
treaty of San Stefano, added to the European powers. Bulgaria, too, 
after long suffering in servitude, was made an embryo nationality, 
with enlarged boundaries and a comprehensive programme. 

The Berlin Congress, however, was called, and by that wire-worked 
conclave of wizards and dupes, the San Stefano treaty was revised, in 
common jealousy of Russia and in the special interest of Austria and 
England, because the ambassadors of Italy and France were unfit for 
their momentous missions — a fact which all intelligent and impartial 
Italian and French republicans feel and realize ; and Austria, in 
exultation over Italy and France, occupies Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
and Great Britain, by a secret treaty, is in possession of the island 
of Cyprus, whereby its Mediterranean possessions are enlarged, and 
Italy and France are correspondingly belittled as Mediterranean 
powers. And thus meantime that the Turk — cruel to the Christians 
and treacherous to the Russians — was mulcted by the Austrians and 
Britons, Italy and France were treated as gulls, and appeased with 
words. Woe to the Berlin ambassadors of Italy and France! 

What next may transpire in European Turkey is in the future, 
sealed from the knowledge of man. But that the Berlin treaty which 
ignored Italy and France as Mediterranean powers, aggrandized Aus- 
tria and inflated Great Britain with bluster, is merely a postponement 
of a final settlement which the powers did not then dare to make, in 
the face of the socialistic and other agitations antagonistic to dynastic 
shams, frauds and pensions, is patent to every unofiicial subject in 
Europe. Servia and Montenegro, however, both now independent — 
for the Berlin Congress did not venture to ignore the Servia and 
Montenegro provisions of the San Stefano treaty — occupy positions 
which justify expectations of aggrandizement. In truth, the theme 
of European Turkey bristles with possibilities which change shape 
according to circumstances, as sea waves take form and derive their 
force from the prevailing wind. 

Russia and Turkey, as the two principals in the war, did their best, 
and Turkey made peace to keep the Russians out of Constantinople ; 
for if the Porte had crossed the Bosphorus and fixed its head-quarters 
in Asia Minor, and a war of the powers had ensued, it is safe to 
predict that Turkish reign in European Turkey would have ended ; 
though how the spoils might have been divided it is useless to consider. 

However, with Turkey razeed into disproportion to Russia as a 
military power, Russia can contemplate the stay of the Turks in Con- 
stantinople as citizens of the United States contemplate the Spaniards 



5i 

in the island of Cuba. As a Spanish possession Cuba is not a menace; 
but the United States would not tolerate the transfer of Cuba to 
Great Britain, Germany or France. The Americans do not covet 
Cuba nor want it annexed to the Union, but the Americans would 
interpose to prevent the transfer of Cuba from the possession of Spain 
to a power rival or competitor to the United States ; for wnth Spain 
the United States can cultivate reciprocal commercial relations, with- 
out danger of serious misunderstanding. And so, in like manner and 
from corresponding cause, Russia could contemplate Turkey, as left 
by the treaty of San Stefano, in possession of Constantinople, because 
Russia and Turkey could themselves carry out their own treaty and 
jointly regulate the navigation of the straits from the Black Sea to 
the Mediterranean. This reasoning, clear when the treaty of San 
Stefano was signed in February, 1878, is conclusive since the Berlin 
treaty of July, 1878. 

True, the British, who have money to bribe corrupt men in office, 
and who wear brass to hide blushing, say that it is Russia which has 
been deprived of the fruits of conquest, waged for the deliverance of 
Christian populations from oppressions that darken history through 
generations of time ; but the truth is, Turkey has been surgeoned 
Avhere previously it had not been even singed ; and to appease British 
lust, Christian emancipation has been indefinitely postponed, though 
Turkey is weaker if not smaller than it was left by the treaty of San 
Stefano ; whereas Russia, with Bessarabia regained to the Danube 
and Pruth, and Batoum and Kars and about nine thousand square 
miles of contiguous territory annexed in Asia Minor, can recuperate 
in patience for another struggle when a propitious opportunity recurs; 
for Russia, vast and powerful as it is, cannot stay its march nor stop 
its wars whilst the Turk as an enemy patrols the Straits and lingers 
in Europe, a scandal to the Christian Church and a reproach to civil- 
ized mankind. 

And perchance, whilst dynasties and churches plot and counterplot, 
the masses may exercise the inherent right of revolution, and make 
the crowned heads of Europe bend and bow down in the popular blast 
against tyranny and titles, like reeds and willows in a storm. 

Russia Russianizes where it overruns, and the United States 
Americanize where they annex. France contains nothing but French- 
men in a national sense, and all Germany is fatherland to Germans. 
Italy, too, is homogeneous, and Spain is a unit. But Austria is a 
cabinet-piece, stuck together with diplomatic glue, not a fusion of 
affiliatino- metals cast in a mould, as bronze is a fusion of copper and 
tin fluxed with zinc and lead to make it a limpid fluid for a casting 
satisfiictorv to the artist's eye and cohesive to withstand the weather. 



Hungary is a seed-garden of discontent ; and when the hydro- 
graphic basin of the Elbe shall have been made the model of a polit- 
ical potter's crock, Bohemia will be in "Germany. 

Lord Beaconsfield is Colonel Mulberry Sellers developed into Mac- 
beth the ambitious, with his witches, only that his Duncan is in Con- 
stantinople and his witches are in India, 

If a Cromwell were to rise in England, a Wallace in Scotland, and 
an Emmet in Ireland, and the labor organizations in Great Britain 
would simultaneously proclaim a Republic, the Houses of Lords and 
Commons would become the Senate and Assembly of a new Republic, 
and the British Islands would be United States, with a neighbor 
Republic in France, across the English Channel, and a sympathetic 
Republic in America, between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. 

The case of R. A. Ammon, the brakeman, who successfully oper- 
ated a railroad during the Pittsburgh riots in July, 1877, when mob 
rule prevailed in that city, where destruction was rampant from 
Saturday night to Sunday eve, under circumstances indelibly dis- 
graceful to its military and police authorities and civic population, is 
an illustration of how an improvised administration, intuitively organ- 
ized, might succeed in revolution organized out of riot, without dis- 
order in civil administration. The people have only to organize their 
power with wisdom and apply it without rashness, to make revolution 
out of bondage into freedom a success in permanent reform. 

And if this be deemed too hopeful a view of American adaptability 
or human intuition under free institutions which germinate ideas and 
expedients for exigencies unexpected and surprising, the example of 
General U. S. Grant should give peace to the doubting mind. 

In May, 1861, U. S. Grant, a private citizen of Galena, Illinois, 
raised a company of volunteers in his own neighborhood, marched 
with it to Springfield, the capital of Illinois, and tendered his services 
to Governor Yates, who turned his constituent's experience to prac- 
tical account in organizing the State troops ; for U. S. Grant had 
served in the Mexican war, and was, moreover, a graduate of West 
Point, the national military school. Here, then, was material for a 
military schoolmaster, in a soldier trained and tried. 

In time of peace he had retired to private life ; but when secession 
appealed to the sword, he reappeared in behalf and defence of the 
Union ; and how persistently and successfully he waged war and won 
battle is accepted truth in the familiar history of a pure patriot and 
great commander. 

The unexampled cosmopolitan attentions paid U. S. Grant in for- 
eign lands attest to a worldwide appreciation of his conspicuous mer- 



53 

its, effulgent in fidelity and heroism to cause and country in civil war, 
and afterwards in good intentions in trying times. 

From a private citizen U. S. Grant ascended step by step to the 
top-landing of commander-in-chief of- all the armies of the United 
States ; after a civil war of four years he was twice elected President 
of the United States ;' and on the expiration of his second term as 
Chief Magistrate, March 3, 1877, he again returned to private cit- 
izenship. 

Honors are not titles, nor are titles merits. Deeds are finally only 
represented by names, and hence in after time, and to posterity, the 
name expresses all, is the symbol of everything. Wherefore Ulysses 
Simpson Grant, or otherwise and popularly and significantly United 
States Grant, stands for the whole subject full and complete, without 
abbreviation, reservation or contraction. 

And when the European subject looks on the American citizen 
U. S. Grant, and sees in him an unassuming man without pretension 
and without title, surely the sight must suggest to his sober reflection 
the vanity of hereditary titles and the costliness of royal perquisites 
and pensions paid to the progeny of dynastic wedlock. 

Grant rose out of the people, one of themselves, and, after public 
service in war and in peace, returned back to the people, one of them- 
selves ; and his example will be illustrious forever in a name aflame 
Avith patriotic fame ; for in him is represented and embodied the trin- 
ity of duties only possible in a republic — private citizen, commander- 
in-chief, chief magistrate. 

Those who advocate a third-term President would mar the finished 
picture of the man, for the third-term thought implies more than it 
expresses, and is not consonant with the precedent set by Washington 
and since observed as a law of sacred import, which cannot be misin- 
terpreted to the American people. 

When France welcomed liberty back to Paris, and drove the red- 
handed and incendiary torch-bearing communists from her temple 
desecrated by their diabolism, and for the third time consecrated the 
sacred edifice whose altar-fires had been twice before extinguished, 
France achieved a grand glory for army-ridden Europe. 

To liberty in its dwelling-place in a republic a mob is a foe as dan- 
gerous and destitute of reason as a dog with the hydrophobia ; for 
intelligent human beings prefer any and every form of government to 
anarchy ; and as the bayonet as an instrument of order is the basis 
of despotism, as the ballot as an expression of power is the basis of 
republicanism, the enemies of order in free government are more than 
disturbers of the peace, and are to be treated, after notice reasonable 
to all not demons, like animals inoculated with the saliva of madness ; 



54 

because between anarchy and orclei' in a republic the law must pre- 
vail or liberty succumb to anarchy, the precursor to despotism ; for 
trust breakers in office and charter-clad offenders who betray invest- 
ors and wrono- employes and transporters would barter away a state 
to a central authority for protection, and sell liberty to enjoy spoils ; 
but where intelligent use is made of the ballot at the polls, abuses in 
the public service, in corporation practice, courts of law and else- 
where, can be reached and abated, and remedies provided for all evils 
curable by pure legislation and honest administration, from the chief 
justice to the street-sweeper. For as " the last shall be first and the 
first shall be last," so in a republic the bootblack-boy may rise above 
the chief justiceship to the presidency of the United States, and the 
born heir to fortune may die a beggar. The few make the noise, the 
many do the honest work of life; the tribunals try but a small per- 
centage of the population for offences, and the jails are few and far 
apart, showing that fidelity to law and duty to society is the rule, dis- 
obedience to law and dishonesty to fellow man the exception ; where 
there is ventilation in the newspapers, a foul transaction smells far- 
ther than an orchard in blossom, yet the fruit ripens in its season, by 
which time the rotten aspirant is in disgrace ; modest merit survives 
in exquisite memories in the affections and in the books, but corrupt 
selfishness, like an ignis fatuus in foul air over decaying matter in a 
morass, is a luminous exhalation that misleads and disappoints ; the 
bad man is on a trap-door with a possible rope overhead, sure oblivion 
beneath his feet, except as he may serve for an admonition in the ser- 
mons of prison chaplains and moral instructors of youth. Apathy, 
too, is sometimes deadly to liberty, as sleep is sometimes death in a 
disguise that disarms suspicion. In a republic inanition in a citizen 
is a crime against society, which can protect itself from a lunatic by 
confining him in an infirmary, whereas the citizen who omits to dis- 
charge his moral responsibility under the civil code is protected 
against incarceration, because to personal freedom he has a natural 
right not forfeited to the statute; for, though mentally defunct to 
political duty, he is physically alive in the social condition ; informa- 
tion and experience are knowledge and wisdom, and government is 
exalted and pure in proportion as the governed participate in public 
affairs and adjust official conduct to a standard that will bear scru- 
tiny, satisfy conscience and command respect. The individual must 
be a creditor in his account with the community in which he is an 
atom, possibly a light; and in proportion as he shows a balance to 
his credit large or small will he be esteemed much or little in the cir- 
cumference of the circle rippled by his proceedings ; for status is a 
valuation put not on promise but on performance; and herein is a 



55 

reason why a man in conspicuous office or position wlio misdirects its 
influences and misapplies its patronage and powers, out of office sinks 
out of sight, and after burial in the earth is lost in oblivion deep as 
a thousand years ; having strayed into forbidden ways and practiced 
unworthy arts, his name is cast out of the vocabulary of his cotem- 
poraries, his coadjutors reproach him to excuse themselves, and the 
public know him no more ; and as a luminary falls, so will its satel- 
lite disappear out of the firmament of preferment, where its borrowed 
light is shed in baleful beams. A community of stockholders has 
twice as many eyes and ears as tongues, and sees and hears more 
than it says. The wicked vanity that underrates the constituency it 
abuses, and trusts fortune to prevent its conviction in the courts, is 
helpless and without defence in the tribunal of the people, where law- 
yers' words are vapors, and lies, like damp rockets, will not coruscate. 

The Philadelphia soldiers of the Pennsylvania National Guard who 
were abandoned to the mob and multitude at Pittsburgh, Saturday 
night, July 21, 1877, under circumstances indescribably disgraceful 
to the local military and police authorities, and who, having success- 
fully defended themselves throughout the night, in a Round House, 
whither they had been improperly ordered by Major General A. L. 
Pearson, of Pittsburgh, marched out of that city Sunday, July 22, 
1877 (pursued by a mob of baser beasts than bulls in a herd, which 
mob fired all its shots from the rear, and so did deeds of murder on 
the holy day), afterwards returned to Pittsburgh with recruits arrived 
out from home and fellow-soldiers from the interior and border 
counties, and reoccupied the scene of riot ; in order that Pittsburgh 
should see and know, and to make Pittsburgh feel and realize in the 
spectacle of its submission, that the law is paramount and the State 
supreme in every part of Pennsylvania. 

Where the law is defied free government does not discuss the cause 
of outbreak against order, life or property. It restores peace, makes 
arrests, assesses damages, and considers a remedy for prevention. 
And the Union is so extensive, and its spread-out population of readers 
and thinkers is so well informed on events past and present, that a 
local demonstration, whether aggravated for political party purposes 
or for arson, pillage, and murder, is followed by instant preparation 
to occupy the scene of riot; yes, that is the word — riot — for insurrec- 
tion is farther from the intentions of a Pennsylvanian than is a vigil- 
ance committee in time of disorder for redressment. And the arson 
and pillage-approving population of Pittsburgh, quiescent where the 
Sunday mob in the public streets assassinated four strangers of the 
Pennsylvania National Guard, sent to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia 
by the State officers in authority at Harrisburg, was meek and quiet 



56 

(and contrite concerning damages), whilst the military possessed Pitts- 
burgh and forced it to eat "humble pie," meantime that railway 
traffic was resumed and trains departed and arrived on schedule time. 

When Governor J. F. Hartranft arrived out at Pittsburgh with 
Pennsylvania troops, R. A. Ammon, the brevetted brakeman, resigned; 
and then Pittsburgh had opportunity in leisure to meditate the con- 
sequences of its mob sympathies, its Saturday night treacheries, and 
its Sabbath-day depot fires and highway murder of strangers under 
orders, in the service of the Commonwealth. 

The crater of a volcano in eruption is an insecure place against the 
lava, cinder and muddy matter cast up out of a "bottomless pit;" 
but the place of torment for sinners doomed, with its mayor in a 
paroxysm^ its police in a frenzy, its mob cantankerous and conten- 
tious, and its stokers overhot from overwork at its fires, as described 
by painters in colors and poets in words, is a place of mercy com- 
pared with pandemonium Pittsburgh on that saturnalian Sunday, 
July 22, 1877. 

Dyeing certain colors is a lost art ; and lying, notwithstanding the 
antiquity of the practice, is still an imperfect disguise and a poor 
substitute, else the efi'orts of the willing wills and weak minds that 
attempted to mitigate the guilt of Pittsburgh by the manufacture of 
imitation truth in crooked afterthoughts would have had a less mor- 
tifying termination ; but the charcoal in the pyres along the railway 
tracks was too black, and the blood of the soldiers shot from behind 
was too red on the stones, and the crime of Pittsburgh was too fully 
recorded in its own and other newspapers of the day and in after 
documents and reports, for lie distilled from fiction to wash out its 
stains. And so Pittsburgh, over its dress suit of smoke, has a sur- 
tout of bills for Allegheny County to. pay. The "insurrection " plea 
was a false key to open the Sinking Fund of Pennsylvania, which 
contains assets coveted for damages payable for the property destroyed 
during the Pittsburgh riot in July, 1877, due not from the State but 
from Allegheny County. The Governor of Pennsylvania, however, 
is a vigilance committee of one, with the veto; and in 1870 Governor 
Geary, with a veto that exploded like a bombshell, saved the Sinking 
Fund of Pennsylvania from robbery. The people of Pennsylvania 
all know who is Governor, and hold that functionary responsible for 
all legislation, except bills passed over his veto. Deriving the veto 
power from the Constitution, he is expected to use it for cause, or 
pass out of office and disappear from political life. To assent that a 
riot was an " insurrection," to substitute the State for Allegheny 
County in the matter of damages, would sink the Governor out of 
sight. But before it can reach the Governor a bill must be passed by 



67 

both branches of the Legislature. Allegheny County is liable, and 
its resources are ample, and that is enough for justice. 

And thus will it be again, if that European transplant called 
"socialism" and "communism," both parasites in a republic, should 
rise in arms against the authorities in any city in the United States. 
When peace is disturbed the law is not palaver but process with force, 
and order is to be maintained at whatsoever cost to its enemies ; appli- 
cation for military aid is a dernier resort, but where invoked for 
sufficient cause it ought to be used with discretion and made effective 
against disorder. Especially is the American Union the wrong field 
for the agrarian from abroad, because his certificate of naturalization, 
which is proof of his promotion to citizenship, is not a license to sow 
treason, seize property, or overturn the social system which is the pro- 
duct of civilization since the deluge. In a republic the state is the 
aggregate of all the people in it, held together by its laws, enacted 
by representatives chosen by ballot at the polls. The minority cannot 
enact new laws, but by discussion and appeal may make proselytes to 
its opinions, till it reverses positions with the opposition and becomes 
in turn the majority party ; whereupon it may graft its measui*es on 
the statutes. Violence or intimidation, however, is not only not 
allowable but is punishable, and as law-breakers, life-takers, and 
property-wreckers incur punishment, so their abettors, for head and 
heart guiltiness, deserve more than reprobation. If a discontented 
adult could on option turn political surgeon and butcher the law, 
according to his interest or his hate, the hand that would smite 
the state would be lifted against life, and society would retro- 
grade. And this consideration makes the demagogue an outlaw in 
manhood, for he knows the end to which his arts tend; but the 
domestic and imported mischief-makers are few, and mob outbreak 
like yellow fever is only an occasional visitation in malarious spots, 
here and there, in the Union ; an uprising of Avicked malcontents 
Avould provoke a concentration and explosion of opposition force that 
would disperse them to the four winds, as a dynamite blast scatters 
quarry stones in atoms through the air. 

The world craves not a new religion, nor will it abandon itself to the 
moral darkness of irreligion. Christianity has done for mankind more 
than all other religions summed together ; and if the Turk reign at 
Philippi where Paul preached, that is because in 1878 England had 
for its idol of popular Avorship the boastful "Disraeli," the Queen of 
England being "Empress of India," where there are 240,000,000 of 
Hindoos and Mahometans, against 31,857,338 Christian subjects in 
Great Britain and Ireland. England's temple is the shop and work- 
shop, and England's God is the "almighty dollar," to which her 



58 



homage is loyal, if selfish ; England's religion is not Christ crucified, 
but interest money accrued and to accrue. On " British interests," 
expressed and reserved, hang all th'e Acts of Parliament, all the 
Proclamations of the Queen. For the world, England, through half 
a century, has been commercial broker and commission agent. But 
this business is now open to competition, and in commercial supremacy 
Great Britain is each year less absolute. Of course, as she "weakens 
in the knees," she becomes lustier in the lungs, to frighten capital 
where she cannot harm it. England is overpeopled and London is 
overgrown, considering its proximity to the land's end in England, 
Wales, and Scotland, which have these areas and populations, to wit : 



England, 
Wales, . 
Scotland, 

Total, Great Britain, 

Ireland, . 

Isle of Man and Channel Islands, 

Army, Navy, Merchant Seamen, 

Great Britain and Ireland, 



Square Miles. 


Census. 


Population. 


50,922 


1871 


21,495,131 


7,897 


1871 


1,217,135 


31,324 


1871 


3,360,018 


89,643 


26,072,284 


82,481 


1871 


5,411,416 


394 


1871 


144,638 




1871 


229,000 



New York, 
Connecticut, . 

New York and Connecticut, 



122,518 

47,156 
4,674 

51,830 



1870 
1870 



31,857,338 

4,357,647 
537,454 

4,895,101 



New York and Connecticut, wdiich in joint area are larger than 
England, jointly contain but 22 per cent, of the population of Eng- 
land ; so that England contains more than four times the joint popula- 
tion of New York and Connecticut, notwithstanding that New York 
State contains New York City, Brooklyn, Buffalo, Albany, Rochester, 
indeed eight of the fifty principal cities in the United States ; and 
Connecticut contains New Haven and Hartford, two of the fifty prin- 
cipal cities in the United States. 

1841. 1851. 1861. 1871. 

Population of Ireland, 8,175,124 6,515,794 5,764,543 5,411,416 

The famine in Ireland, in 1847, caused by the failure of the crops 
of that year, particularly its food staple, the potato, is not an expla- 
nation of the steady decrease in population in each decade since 1841. 
Great Britain imports more than half the wheat consumed by its popu- 
lation ; and, as the palmy days of its foreign trade are past, emigration 



59 

from Great Britain will unquestionably increase and resident popula- 
tion diminish in England as in Ireland. Foreign trade is uncertain ; 
and as Great Britain loses its industrial prestige and customers for 
its manufactures in foreign markets, will not London, which by the 
census of 1871 contained 3,251,804 of population, decline like other 
commercial centres that preceded it in Europe? London is too large 
to subsist on the home trade of an island in the ocean, not twice the 
size of Newfoundland. From London to Liverpool, by railway across 
England, the distance is 201 miles. From New York to San Fran- 
cisco, across the United States, by railway, the distance is 3321 miles. 
Between the Atlantic and the Pacific seaports of the American Union 
there are three thousand miles of prolific interior country, sure to 
contain, in time not distant, two hundred millions of inhabitants. 
Here is a prospect for a home trade very different from the outlook 
from London and Liverpool. Venice and Genoa had a distant trade, 
and lost it. The glory of foreign empire has departed from Rome, 
yet Rome is the capital of Italy nationalized, and is grand in its 
ancient ruins. And although the glory of commercial dominion over 
a vast area will leave London, yet London will still be the capital of 
the island of Great Britain ; and Macaulay's New Zealander, who 
will inevitably appear, may contemplate its ruins, and contrast its 
vastness in desolation with its illustrious predecessors that flourished, 
each a cynosure for a time, and then declined towards oblivion, but 
not into it ; because the historical inventory of the ruins of cities 
abandoned to decay is a perennial entertainment to the antiquarian 
and the student, which latter comprises all the ages of man ; for the 
wise are seldom young, and the cultivated man at three-score years is 
as zealous a student as the better boy at school. The male animal 
that is a baby, boy, and man, in succession, if endowed with more 
than average intellect, is a thinking and remembering machine, from 
the time he can con the alphabet till reason leaves his head or life 
abandons his body. 

"The Mutual Admiration Society," made up of rich and prosperous 
Americans and titled and snobby Englishers, which was in full blast 
preparatory to the negotiation of the Washington treaty of May 8, 1871, 
that was to do much for mankind, and elevate human nature to a 
higher standard in this world, preliminary to a still higher one in the 
next, seems to have moved the unbelief of one observer of men and 
matters, who wrote the following letter, copied from a newspaper of 
November 15, 1876. Its date, April 10, 1871, it will be seen, is 
anterior to the Washington treaty, signed May 8, 1871 ; and its pub- 
lication, November 15, 1876, it will also be noticed, is prior to the 
Halifax Fishery award, made November 23. 1877. 



60 
"English Tactics in America. 



Gen. U. S. Grant, 

'■^ President of the United States. 



April 10, 1871. 



" Honored Sir : — Distinguished men in distinguishing oiEce are 
beset with too many flatterers and hear too few truth-tellers. And 
yet, to rulers of men, facts are as indispensable as food. 

" Your answer to General Buckner, in 1862, drew my attention 
to you, and enlisted my confidence and good wishes. Your military 
case, however, as you know, is made up in the record of the rise and 
fall of an unholy rebellion. And now, in the high office which is the 
people's reward for services rendered them in the field, in a crisis 
which put in jeopardy the aspirations of mankind, you are again on 
trial, this time as Civil Magistrate, charged with the administration 
of the aifairs of a great nation. 

"And now to the purpose of this letter, which is, to caution you 
to beware of British diplomacy, which, like all European diplomacy, 
literally translated, is simply lying according to laiv ! 

" The Dominion of Canada was conceived in hostility to the United 
States ; and American statesmen owe it to their posterity to sunder 
the zone of British territory which flanks the Republic on the north, 
and has its termini in the far apart islands of Newfoundland and 
Vancouver. 

" The treaty of the 15th June, 1846, between the United States 
and Great Britain, which surrendered an opportunity to abut our 
boundary against Russia, at 54°40', to which line Polk and Buchanan 
avowed that our title was ' clear and unquestionable,' is a standing 
shame to American statesmanship. And the interpretation subse- 
quently given to that treaty, by Great Britain, to cover the island 
of San Juan, is a lesson which should not be forgotten at this time. 

" I have been in England, and do not much wonder at the temper 
of its waning ruling class towards the United States. Jealousy, envy, 
covetousness are feelings ditiicult of eradication. The United States 
are overshadowing the British Isles. England's power is faded on the 
continent, and she is in dread lest her hoarded wealth be molested. 

"But instead of looking to Africa, Australia, etc., for new fields 
and new markets, she continually aims to clog and thwart what, to a 
comprehensive vision, is the ' manifest destiny' of these States. 

" If Great Britain were driven out of American waters, the two 
nations could, thereafter, be brought into relations of genuine frater- 
nity. And until that event takes place, or British rule be limited to 
territory cast of Lake Superior, the American heart which may yearn 



61 

to find in Great Britain a 3fother Country, will continue to find instead 
a step-mother country given to ofiicious intermeddling. 

" British territory cannot be Americanized under British rule, as 
witness the animus of the indwellers of that strip of land between 
Niagara and Detroit Rivers, across which railroad companies .send 
freights and passengers to and from New York and Michigan. 

" The valleys of the Saskatchewan and Red Rivers will never be 
Americanized whilst under the jurisdiction of the Dominion, or any 
other British authority, even though, of necessity (not choice), the 
railroads which may traverse them be connected with the railroads of 
Minnesota. 

"British jurisdiction fosters opposition to the United States, exactly 
as a long British border tempts and promotes smuggling into the 
United States. 

" Diplomacy and policy, more than arms, made the greatness of 
Britain. By diplomacy and policy she will make a bad neighbor of 
the Dominion of Canada, even as she makes corrupt tools in the 
Washington lobby. 

"Do not mistake mo. I am not an enemy to Great Britain. On 
the contrary, I appreciate the bulwark she made herself against the 
reactionary revolutions and usurpations of the continent. Never- 
theless, Great Britain must be made to ' accept the situation' in the 
New" World, and to back out of the w'ay of American expansion and 
progress. 

" You, yourself, know full well that what Great Britain did during 
the rebellion, prolonged the rebellion; that her acts, alike of omission 
as of commission, disclosed an impatience to see the Union dissevered; 
that she did cause the disappearance of American shipping from the 
ocean carrying trade between American and foreign ports. You 
know, too, that, before the American public. Great Britain is under 
indictment. And now, finally, what the American people have a 
right to expect is, that British diplomatists shall not once more huyn- 
hug American politicians ! 

"Seward's Alaska purchase and diplomatic expulsion of the French 
from Mexico will jointly perpetuate his statesmanship. 

" What page in American history is more important than Jeffer- 
son's acquisition of Louisiana ? 

" Polk's administration acquired California — a most potential and 
momentous acquisition ; but the treaty of the 15th June, 1846, with 
Great Britain, was the mill-stone which sunk into oblivion the good 
deeds of Polk's reign. 

" Under the indictment found against Great Britain, in the early 
documents of your administration, newspaper opinions, in England, 



02 

were expressed in deeper contrition than at present time. Then it 
was even suggested, here and there, in some of the newspapers, that 
in settlement of the Alabama claims British territory might be ceded 
to the United States. 

" Latterly, however, expounders of English public opinion have 
grown less penitent ; and in lieu of willingness to eat 'humble pie,' 
the British lion is pricked into effort to imitate the ominous growl of 
yore, when it roamed the jungle in India, and before it was made a 
meek denizen of the zoological garden in London." 



As in present time the administration of Thomas Jefferson is uni- 
versally commended throughout the Union for the acquisition of 
Louisiana, and the administration of James K. Polk is credited with- 
out stint for the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of California, 
so hereafter and in full measure of thankfulness will the administra- 
tion of Andrew Johnson (W. H. Seward, Secretary of State) be 
praised for the acquisition of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands; 
whereby Russia and the United States clasped hands across Behring 
Strait, and the rover of the seas and squatter on islands where the 
owner is in poverty or the natives are defenceless is shut out from 
fortifying a Malta in the North Pacific Ocean. 

The precedent furnished by Great Britain in the ruthless extinction 
of the Transvaal Republic in 1877, and the annexation of its territory 
to her possessions in Africa, would justify the United States, as 
against Great Britain, in converting the provinces of British Colum- 
bia and Manitoba into Territories and embryo States of the Union. 
And why should not Great Britain have the "ingredients" of her 
drugged " chalice" " commended to her own lips "? 



CHAPTER VI L 

Since the 4th July, 1776, when the thirteen colonies, all on At- 
lantic tidewater (New Hampshire the northernmost, Georgia the 
southernmost, Pennsylvania the "keystone"), resolved themselves 
into "free and independent States," marvellous events have trans- 
pired, tending to overturn dynasties, expose the sham of kingcraft, 
and ameliorate the condition of mankind, under ratified treaties and 
written constitutions. 

The fiction of "the divine right of kings" has perished from the 
earth ; hereditary subjects have wrung concessions from hereditary 



63 

rulers ; Europe has been rectified in places, remodelled in parts ; 
Russia, developed into a colossal civilizing power, grows and spreads ; 
Germany is moulded into a homogeneous empire ; Italy is a compact 
and intact nationality. And France, the fore-front of the world's 
stage when nations were in the cast of actors, in the seven years 
since the German war, has shown wise humility in calm self-restraint; 
has elevated still higher than before the arts of peace ; and meanwhile 
has evinced a trust in her own capabilities and resources, under cir 
cumstances and in ways that vindicate the Republic, raised up out of 
the ruins of the empire and the ashes of the commune, as the form 
of government best fitted for the French people, in this third genera- 
tion of political revolution, furnace ordeal and fiery trial. The third 
Republic, which demolished the empire and destroyed the commune, 
its two enemies and adversaries, one on either side, now stands " a 
pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night;" and no despot 
can make it vanish nor demagogue make it dark. 

True, the face of Europe is still freckled with Heligoland, Malta 
and Gibraltar, and with spot powers in court-plaster patches between 
Skager Rack and Dover Strait, and between the river Pruth and the 
Strait of Otranto. But considering how much has been compassed 
in the rectification of European boundaries in the last twenty years, 
the prospect is cheering that the time is not distant when Europe will 
be apportioned among less than half a score of nationalities all Chris- 
tian, the Turk retired ; and that then the nations of Europe will at 
last be wise enough to live in peace with each other, content to allow 
distant peoples to govern themselves, and leave intercontinental inter- 
trade to regulations prescribed in treaties. 

The time will soon have gone by for partitioning ofi" the earth among 
dynasties supported sumptuously for breeding stock through royal 
marriages for diplomatic ends ; in Europe nowadays nationalities com- 
mand paramount consideration, and the reigning houses rule not by 
" divine right," but as the constituted and installed heads of the gov- 
ernments ; for, after all, an empire is .but another name for a state, 
and from an autocracy to a democracy the distance is but a bridge of 
spans on different plans, whatever may be said about constitutional 
monarchy, with a pensioned household and a class made noble by 
patent, as if a patent of nobility were a gauge of merit, when it is 
only evidence of a machine-made honor or a prize-ticket gift ; for a 
patent cannot ennoble a name or make a name great, because true 
greatness is the homage paid by mankind to public benefactors for 
unselfish service ; and it is with men as with books and battles, only 
one here and there serving to make a fame or mark an epoch or era 
in the chronology of time. 



G4 

Great events in America, due to patriotic effort and self-denial, 
have wrought out grand results to universal man in a new nation and 
in the old world. The government of the United States has withstood 
attack from without and also from within, has had foreign wars and a 
civil war, and was strong enough to triumph in both ordeals. Slavery, 
the graft of Great Britain, has been extirpated, and now there is not 
a seed of poison in the Constitution to germinate a parasite or justify 
a reproach. And the corrupt lobbyist, bribe-taker and trust-betrayer, 
the corporation anaconda and the ring boa-constrictor, would fain re- 
habilitate as conservatives good as Tweed and his coadjutors, who, 
having amassed millions contrary to honesty and duty, if let alone 
and not molested or exposed, would advocate low taxes, civil service 
reform, economy in corporation practice, and dividends to stock- 
holders. But the sword of justice is unsheathed, and offenders fear 
lest where it may not smite with its edge it may smack with its flat 
side. The uneasy sinner is the dishonest man found out. And for 
the hypocrite who delivers himself of his moral lecture from the chim- 
ney-top, and descends thence by the flue to emerge sooted from the 
cellar, or makes the editorial column or the official corporation report 
a vehicle for deceptive untruth, exposure is sure disgrace as contempt 
is sore punishment ; because the offender who may indurate his face 
and banish the blush from his cheek cannot deaden the sensitive 
nerves between his five senses and his mental reflections. 

For bankrupts in reputation look not alone among delinquent 
debtors in ordinary and unofficial transactions, but also to those who 
betrayed official trust, and after investigation or trial were hurled 
down from the pinnacle of high esteem into the dusty way whei'e the 
tramp travels. 

As a political coupling the Constitution is potential to hold together 
the train of States from Maine to California; and all the mending 
the Constitution needs is to make the presidential term six years in- 
stead of four, render the incumbent ineligible for re-election, and 
guard the franchise and the electoral return against fraud. 

All attempts to found royalty in North America have failed, tragi- 
cally and ignominiously. Mexico has had two emperors, Iturbide 
and Maximilian, whose short reigns are bloody chapters in its event- 
ful history ; the first-named was shot after a trial in 1824, the last- 
named was shot after a trial in 1867 ; and these two tearful lessons 
will not be lost on diplomatists, adventurers and demagogues. 

The progress of population in the nation of the United States is 
without precedent, as will be seen in what follows. 

The estimated number of inhabitants in the colonies represented in 
the Congress at Philadelphia in 1775" was 3,000,000. 



(If) 



At that time the colonies ranked in population Virginia first, Massa- 
chusetts second, Pennsylvania third, Maryland fourth. New York 
was equalled by Connecticut, North Carolina and South Carolina. 
Maryland contained 62,035 more of population than New York, and 
62,034 less than Pennsylvania. The original colonies all abutted on 
tidewater, and among the three millions of population are included 
Tories who were averse to independence and non-combatants in love 
■with peace. 

The first census of the nation of the United States was taken in 
1790, 80 that in all there have been nine decennial censuses, beginiiing 
with 1790 and including 1870. And here is the record made of the 
aggregate population at each census : 

1790. 1800. 1810. 1820. 1830. 1840. 1850. 1860. 1870. 
3.929,214 5,308,48.'! 7,239,881 9,633,822 12,866,020 17,069,453 23,191,876 31,443,321 38,558,371 

According to the ninth census of the United States, taken in 1870, 
there were of native-born inhabitants 32,901,142. 

Foreign-born inhabitants 5,657,229. 

The population of the United States, consequently, in 1870 com- 
prised eighty-five per cent, of native-born and fifteen per cent, of 
foreign-born population. 

Unfortunately America is a misnomer, as to call England Anglo- 
Saxon is a misnomer ; for Christopher Columbus, not Americus 
Vespucius, discovered America, and England is Saxon-Norman, and 
America is Celtic-Teutonic. In proof of this, attention is invited to 
the nationalities of the foreign-born population of the United States 
in 1870. 

Ireland, . . 1,855,827 
All Germany, . 1,690,633 
England, . . 550,924 
All British America, 493,404 
Scotland, . . 140,835 
France, . . 110,402 

The first battle of the revolution was fought at Lexington, Massa- 
chusetts, April 19, 1775. On the 19th October, 1781, Lord 
Cornwallis with his army surrendered to General Washington, at 
Yorktown, Virginia. Provisional Articles of Peace were signed 
November 30, 1782. An ag-reement that all hostilities should cease 
was signed January 20, 1783. On the 19th of April, 1783, exactly 
eight years after the battle at Lexington, which opened the war, a 
proclamation of peace was issued by Washington. 

From tiie achievement of Independence the American Republic has 
been an attraction to immigrants, particularly from Ireland and 
Germany ; and from these Celtic and Teutonic sources the Union has 



Norway, 


114,246 


Mexico, . 


. 42,435 


Sweden, 


97,332 


Denmark, 


. 30,107 


Switzerland, 


75,153 


Italy, 


. 17,157 


All Austria, 


74,534 


Belgium, 


. 12,553 


Wales, 


74,5.33 


West Indies, 


. 11,570 


China, 


63,042 


Russia, . 


. 4,644 



GO 

derived the bulk of its foreign, the basis of its native population. 
And as the issue of foreign parents are native Americans, and the 
process of fusion has been in operation since Europe peopled 
America's shores, the American race is a Celtic- Teutonic, not an 
Anglo-Saxon type of the human species. It was the Norman graft 
that made Britain great. iVnd where the Normans grafted there they 
grew. 

What happened to Adam and his posterity may be left to histo- 
rians, prophets, and preachers to descant, for an initial in Noah and 
the ark-load which he landed on Ararat ; since this brings us down to 
a period relatively modern, and gives the human family a new depart- 
ure from Armenia, not far from Eden and all in Asia. 

The Dominion of Canada, organized as a propaganda, cannot crown 
a ruler, install a dynasty, nor manufacture an aristocracy by patent- 
right; for exotic shoots from royal roots, or suckers from noble stumps, 
do not sprout after transplant to North America, where old States 
sow pioneers and new States grow from home increase and European 
overflow. 

The Union is the product not of birthright but of honest industry, 
Christian toleration and educated self-reliance. The people reign 
and the people rule ; and incumbents of conspicuous office, not con- 
spicuous for merit, may flash in the political sky like a rocket in the 
night air, but are sure to disappear from public office, public consider- 
ation, and public sight. True, parasites abound in political life as in 
animal and vegetable life ; but dishonesty begets opprobrium, and the 
unfaithful public servant sinks into obscurity and is heard of no more, 
save to "point a moral and adorn a tale." To be sure money will 
buy praise, but the promiscuous flatterer is like the fly which leaves a 
speck of dirt where it finds a grain of sugar. 

The robust man is not always healthy in all his vital organs, but 
the tendency of nature is to health, and unless the wrong medicine is 
administered he soon recovers. 

So the political body may not be perfect in all its parts, yet it may 
be complete in most of its functions, and only need repair where there 
is discovered imperfection. The duration of office is limited, and con- 
stitutions and laws are open to amendment. The bullet is the 
unthinking instrument of force, used against the subject if he claim 
the rights which it is the duty of the citizen to exercise. Man can 
nowhere be free but in a republic. And if the subject boast of the 
pure blood of his prince, the citizen can cite the purer blood of the 
race-horse, which receives a physical training superior to a prince 
in paternal antecedents and safeguards against indulgences and indis- 
cretions. 



67 

Asa large percentage of the patent medicines sold in the shops are 
quack nostrums, so a hirgc percentage of patent title-bearers are spuri- 
ous compounds, labelled to circulate at a social price above intrinsic 
value. And the divorce courts of Europe attest that tempted virtue 
is sometimes weak to resist vice as well where rank is acquired by 
inheritance in circles professedly exclusive as among less pretentious 
people. 

England produced Shakspeare, America produced Washington. 
Neither of these men inherited a title, yet each left a fame that time 
brightens, as royalty dims, in the shadows of "coming events." 

A living body, the planetary system, the universe of God, are all 
machines in motion, operating to the schedule of the Supreme intelli- 
gence, the Creator of the earth and of Adam in Eden, and all things 
between and beyond the outermost orbs in space, visible through the 
magnifying aids to science and research. 

The astronomer contemplates the heavens and is filled with adora- 
tion of the Maker of the firmament. The statesman with his finger 
revolves a ball mapped with the nations of the world, and, contrast- 
ing the imperfect machinery of human government with the order in 
nature, applies himself to the improvement and aggrandizement of 
his country. 

The nations of Europe, though the issue of a new departure out of 
Noah's ark in Armenia, after the deluge, are nevertheless a spread- 
out of patches cut with swords and held together with treaty tape; 
and in this patchwork of centuries every rent makes two " ragged 
edges," one of which is pieced out, the other cut away, as when Savoy 
and Nice were scissored from Italy and fitted to France, and Alsace 
and Lorraine were sworded from France and sewed to Germany. 

Or later, as when the Berlin Congress in 1878 donated to Austria, 
for reasons not founded in truth nor of a justifying nature, the 
Turkish provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for Austria did nothing 
whilst Russia and Turkey were at war, but chorus with Great Britain 
in bluster and preparation, not however, as the sequel shows, to fight 
Russia and risk an European conflagration, but to steal from Turkey 
in its extremity ; because it was clear that Russia would not vacate 
Bessarabia, Batoum or Kars, having vanquished Turkey in war ended 
bv the treaty of San Stefano between the two belligerents. And 
therefore. Great Britain and Austria negotiated and threatened in the 
interest of Turkey, against Russia and the San Stefano treaty, till 
the map of Turkey was rectified by the Berlin Congress, Avhich por- 
tioned off Bosnia and Herzegovina to Austria, and Great Britain 
obtained Cyprus Island through a secret treaty. 

Turkey's volunteer attorneys divided part of their client's assets 



08 
• 
between themselves, and then conciliated their plundered dupe with 
the excuse, that it had better part with Bosnia and Herzegovina to 
Austria and Cyprus Island to Great Britain, than carry out with 
Russia the provisions of the San Stefano treaty. And when the 
Berlin Congress prescribed for Austria's aggrandizement, its "man- 
date" was equivalent in dishonesty to a military order to billet troops 
in a bank to manipulate its aftairs, lest thieves might break into its 
vaults and steal its deposits. It is because the diplomacy of Europe 
is operated in the interest of dynasties, sometimes in disregard of the 
populations governed, that extreme opinions are promulgated through 
secret societies, and imperial rulers live in political twilight and intel- 
lectual unrest. 

In horse-power times gone by, the weight of a four-footed animal 
on a treadmill which turned under its feet propelled a boat across a 
ferry, and caused light machinery to move in a mill ; but nowadays 
the steam-engine hauls trains of cars over mountains, propels ships 
across seas, and drives looms in factories. And as the steam-engine 
is a motor in machinery, so is the ballot a motor in government. The 
sceptre is no longer a magic wand; and the one-man power in a crown 
is falling into disuse after the one-horse power on the treadmill ; for 
this is a practical age, and a wooden figure-head is an abomination in 
the sight of thinking man, who associates the idea with a vessel in 
water, where a figure-head does not interfere with the bowsprit nor 
impair the discipline of the crew*Dn board. 

Institutions influence the minds of men as climate aff"ects crops in 
the ground. There must be an even start or there can be no fair race. 
To be born free and equal in the law is a stimulus to eifort, and hence 
in a republic the honest, earnest man moves on even in the front, in- 
curring risks and enjoying rewards. 

The productions of an arable belt of land outstretching north and 
south across twenty degrees of latitude, say from Galveston in Texas 
to Pembina in Minnesota, are of very many more varieties than the 
productions of a belt due east and west across twenty-five degrees of 
longitude, say from Winnipeg to the Pacific waters, in the Dominion 
of Canada. 

The better side of Manitoba is its south side, open to the sun and 
zephyr, which thaw its surface to its isothermal limit, and give it a 
season for agriculture. Manitoba will be forced by necessity to cul- 
tivate a trade southward, because the staples of which it may produce 
a surplus, over home consumption, will be very few ; whereas the 
States south of Manitoba grow oats, grasses, rye, barley, potatoes 
and wheat ; and also corn, flax, hemp, tobacco, rice, sugar cane and 
cotton; vegetables and fruits, too, are in boundless profusion. 



69 

In verity the capacity of the Mississippi basin for production is 
beyond estimate by ordinary calculation ; for, though the earth is 
peopled over its circumference, one-third part of its inhabitants dwell 
in China proper, within an area but little larger than the Mississippi 
basin, and not so large as the joint area of the Mississippi basin and 
the thirteen original States ; in other words, one-third of the whole 
human family dwell in less space than that portion of the Union which 
is east of the Rocky Mountains ! 

In 1871, England, within its area of 50,922 square miles (Minne- 
sota is larger than England and Scotland together), contained 
21,495,131 of population. And Great Britain and Ireland, com- 
prising England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Isle of Man and Channel 
Islands, altogether 122,518 square miles (the area of Minnesota and 
Iowa, jointly, is 138,576 miles), in 1871 contained a population of 
31,857,338. These sizes are suggestive, because in 1770, one hun- 
dred and one years prior to the census of 1871, England and Wales con- 
tained a joint population of only 7,428,000. In the beginning of the 
present century (1801), the population of "London and suburbs" 
was 864,845 ; in 1870 the population of New York city was 942,292, 
and, including its suburbs, about 1,750,000 ; so the United States, in 
1870, contained a larger city than Europe contained in 1801, not- 
withstanding the antiquity of its capital cities and trade centres. 

Philadelphia, too, is destined, from natural causes, to be a city of 
very large population ; it is on a deep and broad tidal river, and is 
encircled by garden country of unequalled fertility; is in close prox- 
imity to mineral regions that supply cheap fuel and command the sea- 
board market ; is a focus of communications to the sea, the lakes, the 
cotton States, the Mississippi basin, and the Pacific coast ; finally, 
Philadelphia is a city of cheap homes and teeming markets, and its 
working population, skilled in an infinity of arts, prosecuted in estab- 
lishments of all sizes, from ground plans that cover acres to an attic 
floor a few feet square, have opportunities for country recreation in 
its parks ; for the education of children in its schools ; and for the 
instruction and entertainment of everybody in its churches, libraries 
and public places. 

Philadelphia contains but a comparatively small percentage of 
foreign-born, is intensely American in its political sentiments, and if 
less metropolitan in appearance and fashion than its neighbor, is more 
American in its proclivities and more multifarious in its manufac- 
tures. And fortunate is it for the whole country that the cities of 
New York and Philadelphia, and the States of New York and Penn- 
sylvania, so near together in geography, are so diff"ereiit in character- 
istics and employments; for as "familiarity breeds contempt," so 



70 

similarity breeds indifference, because " variety is the spice of life ;" 
and so when New York and Philadelphia are considered together, their 
differences are bases for intercourse and intertrade, as the differences 
between two nations furnish groundwork for commercial treaties ; 
since two nations that grow the same staples, manufacture the same 
things and deal in the same merchandise, have nothing to interchange, 
no ground for compromise, no plea for reciprocation, A nation that 
buys outside of its borders must sell outside of its borders, else trea- 
sure instead of flowing inward will be drained outward ; but as no 
nation can supply all its own wants, every nation must buy in foreign 
markets ; and these necessities are the true bases of international 
intertrade. Thus the United States is a buyer of coffee, tea and 
sugar, and a seller of cotton, breadstuffs, oil, and provisions ; true, 
there are scores of other articles besides these in the catalogue of the 
foreign trade of the United States, but the articles named constitute 
the principal items in the import and export lists. Of the manufac- 
tures of iron, cotton and wool the United States import less and less 
from year to year; and herein is where the shoe pinches Great Bri- 
tain, which covets the American market, and so preaches free trade 
to dissuade America from following in British footsteps through a 
period of protection, till its manufactures were established and its 
labor trained. 

The native American and the foreign-born citizen both know and 
appreciate the condition of the subject in Europe too well to permit 
the lawyer-politician, or any one else in Congress, to vote away pro- 
tection to American labor, not so much for the benefit of the British 
laborer as the British aristocrat, whose established caste, made up of 
dukes, marquises, earls, viscounts, barons, own the land and enjoy 
the luxuries of life. 

The manufacturing plant now in operation in the United States is 
of so large capacity that the competition is sufficiently active between 
the home manipulators of our own staples ; so free trade means op- 
pression to the American laborer and loss of American capital invested 
in machinery, because in Great Britain labor is impotent for its own 
protection against the aristocracy which is above it, as a weather-vane 
on a church steeple is above its foundation-stone. 

The Northern Pacific Railroad Company, in its general account, 
which has a total of $147,251,212 on $20,545,883 charged to con- 
struction and equipment, twice the money-cost of road built and 
equipped, has this item : 

"Assets acquired under decree of court, $44,966,583." 

These assets doubtless consist mainly of the par of shares or bonds 



71 

mostly bonus, and not convertible into money at any price worthy of 
consideration. Yet the item has "millions in it" — in the books ! 

Great Britain undoubtedly is possessed of prodigious wealth, par- 
ticularly if its investments at home and abroad be counted at par ; 
but Great Britain is a small country, whilst its investments are in all 
parts of the earth, from which the principal of money loaned can 
never be recalled, for certificates of loan are cut out and off by fore- 
closure, sale and reorganization, and bankruptcy is a sponge that 
obliterates book accounts. 

Great Britain, too, has a foreign trade which diminishes in profit ; 
and so from its foreign investments and its foreiffn ti'ade British in- 
come is reduced. Thus Great Britain is menaced with loss in its 
capital and in its trade. 

The exceptionally favorable condition of the foreign trade of the 
United States in recent years will appear in the following exhibit of 
the imports and exports for the last four official years, compiled 
from reports of the Chief of the Bureau of Statistics : 



Year ended June 30, 

Domestic Exports — Merchandise 

reduced to gold values, . . . 

Domestic Specie, 


1875. 

$499,284,100 
83,857,129 


1876. 

$525,582,247 
50,038,691 


1877. 

$589,670,224 
43,134,738 


1878. 

$680,683,798 
27,054,985 


Total Domestic Exports, . . . 


$583,141,229 


$575,620,938 


$632,804,962 


$707,738,783 


Foreign Exports — Merchandise, . 
" " Specie, . . . 


$14,158,611 
8,275,013 


$14,802,424 
6,467,611 


$12,804,996 
13,027,499 


$14,200,402 
6,678,240 


Total Foreign Exports, .... 


22,433,624 


21,270,036 


25,832,495 


20,878,642 


Aggregate Exports, 


$605,574,853 


$596,890,973 


$658,637,457 


$728,617,425 


Imports — Merchandise, .... 
Imports — Specie, 


533,005,436 
20,900,717 


460,741,190 
15,936,681 


451,315,992 
40,774,414 


437,097,237 
29,821,313 


Total Foreign Imports, .... 

SmurARY. 
Exports from the United States, 
Imports into the United States, . 


$553,906,153 

1875. 

$605,574,853 

553,906,153 


$476,677,871 

1876. 
$596,890,973 

476,677,871 


$492,090,406 

1877. 

$658,637,457 

492,090,406 


$466,918,550 

1878. 

$728,617,425 

466.918,550 


Excess of Exports over Imports, 


$51,668,700 


$120,213,102 


$166,547,051 


$261,698,875 



Here, in verity, is a progress to be proud of, for no other nation 
can approximate these relative proportions in export and import trade. 
The summarized result given demonstrates conclusively that the 
American Republic exports largely more than it imports ; that the 
Americans sell to foreigners much more tlian they buy from foreign- 
ers ; and that the Americans are a creditor people in account current 
with the intertrading nations of the earth. This, truly, is the acme 
of commercial superiority and independence. 



72 

The American Union is the largest producer of the precious metals, 
■wherefore gold and silver must be added to its breadstuffs, cotton, oil, 
tobacco, provisions and manufactured articles, the miscellany being 
distinguished as well for its variety as for its value. 

Since the rebellion against the Union, which was suppressed in 
1865, after four years of civil war, the nation of the United States has 
more than doubled its exports of domestic merchandise to foreign 
countries; and since 1873, when inflation collapsed after six years of 
rampant speculation caused not by the war whereby the rebellion was 
suppressed, as erroneously alleged by quack political economists and 
artfully charged by charter-clad banditti, but by the Union Pacific 
Railroad Company's Credit Mobilier contract of 1867 ; Northern 
Pacific and Texas Pacific, and scores of other railway swindles on 
investors of small savings ; the incorporation of roving contract and 
improvement companies by the Legislature of Pennsylvania, particu- 
larly in 1869—70-71 ; and kindred false pretences contrived to cheat 
the people with counterfeit tokens in the similitude of negotiable 
bonds. Never was history more cunningly perverted than Avhen it is 
made to charge to the war of 1861-65 the lottery-policy railway 
bond and bonus railway share speculations of 1867—73. And high- 
waymen and brigands, who incur personal hazard in their out-door 
depredations, are heroic thieves contrasted with an equal number of 
official sneaks clad in charters granted for public objects, but per- 
verted in practice to promote private ends in dishonest ways. 

The government of the United States had resources in custom 
duties, taxes, etc.. to pay interest on its indebtedness; but corporations, 
firms, and individuals as debtors had to pay interest out of principal 
borrowed, where the profits earned were insufficient, or fail. And as 
money borrowed was soon expended or divided, and the profits were 
less than the interest payable, disaster was the inevitable conclusion 
under the circumstances. 

The outlays charged to construction and collateral purposes by 
corporations of all kinds, managed by bonus financiers and by san- 
guine men, and by firms and individuals for new establishments 
devoted to the industries and manufactures, and for alterations and 
additions made to enlarge capacity and facilitate production, during 
the six consecutive years from 1867 to 1873, amounted to a 
prodigious aggregate of liabilities, bearing interest at a rate extra- 
ordinary in some cases and high on the average ; whereas those who 
bought United States bonds during the war invested their own money, 
and consequently did not incur debt in the transaction. The war 
absorbed capital in United States bonds for investment, and to its 
creditors the government has been faithful in the payment of interest 



73 

accrued ; but in the six years of speculation (commencing two years 
after the war had ended, and after the government had not only 
ceased to borrow but had decreased the national debt and the annual 
interest payable by the United States), many more millions of indebt- 
edness was rashly and recklessly incurred than the total interest- 
bearing debt of the United States, which, at its maximum, August 
31, 1865, amounted to $2,381,530,294. 

This is a large sum, it is true, charged against the United States ; 
nevertheless it is not near so large as the charged increase in the 
liabilities of the railroad companies in the United States, from the 
end of 1867 to the end of 1873, as witness: 

1873. 1867. Increase. 

Miles of Railroad 

reported on, 66,237 30,000 36,237 

Capital Stock, $1,947,638,584 $756,223,000 $1,191,415,584 

Funded Debt, 1,836,904,450 416,658,000 1,420,246,450 



Total liabilities, $3,784,543,034 $1,172,881,000 $2,611,662,034 

If the entire railroad mileage in the United States had been reported 
on, and all the floating indebtedness included, the increase in the 
liabilities of the railroad companies for 1873 over 1867 would be 
about $3,000,000,000 ! 

At the end of 1873 there were in operation in the United States, 
of railroad, 70,857 miles. Railroad constructed in six years ending 
December 31, 1873, in the United States, 31,508 miles, exceeding 
the total railroad mileage in the United States at the outbreak of the 
rebellion in 1861. Thus there were more miles of railroad built in 
the United States in the six years subsequent to 1867 than in the 
thirty-five years prior to 1862 ! 

France prospered after the disastrous war of 1870-71, otherwise it 
could not have so promptly paid its enormous indemnity to Germany. 

Great Britain has had no costly war for a long time, but Great 
Britain is depressed to extremity in its trade and industries, notwith- 
standing it has enjoyed a long peace. 

Eight years elapsed between the end of civil war in the United 
States and the financial crisis in 1873. In a diagnosis of the United 
States the war which ended in the spring of 1865 is not the cause of 
the depression since the summer of 1873; on the contrary, the col- 
lapse of credit in 1873 was caused by speculation and expansion 
commenced in the summer of 1867, prior to which date Tweed's 
Tammany Ring, the Union Pacific Railroad Company's Credit Mobi- 
lier contract which surpassed Aladdin's magic lamp, the Southern 
Railway Security rover, the Northern Pacific Railroad bond bubble. 



74 

# 

the California and Texas Construction Company's Texas and Pacific 
Railway juggle, and kindred inventions of bonus financiers, were not 
in existence. 

The capital of a nation is its principal in excess of its debts, and a 
nation is rich when its income from investments and its profits from 
its trade jointly exceed its interest payments and all outgoes charge- 
able to expenses. Where there is a balance to the credit of a year, 
the surplus of income over outgo is capital accumulated. But where 
a nation expends more than its receipts, it diminishes its capital or 
incurs debt. And as Great Britain in recent years has imported 
many millions more in money value than it has exported, and has 
collected a diminished sum from its. foreign investments, the conclu- 
sion is that in recent years Great Britain has been living in part on 
its principal accumulated in prior years ; for as a creditor Great 
Britain has incurred immense losses in foreign countries and corpora- 
tions. 



CHAPTER VIIL 

In the spread of commerce nations achieved greatness and cities 
amassed wealth, which, however, neither could hold, and consequently, 
the commercial centre of the world, moved from place to place around 
the Mediterranean shore, and thence to the Netherlands, at last was 
shifted to the Thames, and London was developed into a vast city. But 
London cannot go on growing forever, and as its income, commissions 
and profits are now greatly reduced, compared with years gone by, 
London may at any time suffer from panic and from shrinkage in value 
of real estate. And as the exodus of skilled workmen from Great 
Britain is certain to continue, London will ere long feel and show the 
effect of decadence in principal invested and income collectable. The 
volume of business may be large, the measure of profit may be small ; 
machinery superseded, property depreciated, markets divided, com- 
petition aggressive ; these are the tendencies of the times in Great 
Britain, and these are the considerations that determine intelligent 
Britons to seek the United States, where, if the shops are full at 
present, there are cheap lands' open to settlement. Interesting, 
instructive and consolatory is the migration to the agricultural lands 
west of the Mississippi River, already penetrated with railways and 
provided with transportation. 

The Eastern States are all importers of agricultural products from 
the West; and, meanwhile, as the Ease grows in population, consump- 
tion will increase; and so the West, itself a large consumer of its own 



75 

products, has a customer in the East, and beyond the Eastern States 
is Europe. For surplus popuhations accumulated in particular branches 
of industry, as labor is divided at present time, there is no such cor- 
rector and regulator as agriculture. In a short time, therefore, with 
proper duties on the products of foreign labor at starvation prices, 
the internal affairs of the United States will adjust themselves to a 
new distribution of domestic employment, and " all things will work 
together for the common good," like trains on a railroad, to a new 
time-table. 

Chicago, a marvel of rapid growth, will continue to develop and in- 
crease in population, in manufactures and in trade; St. Louis likewise 
is sure of long continued commercial expansion and industrial accumu- 
lation ; New Orleans will be the entrepot of prodigious totals of cosmo- 
politan commerce ; and St. Paul will be conspicuous and important. 

Like the Yang-tse-kiang, in China, the Mississippi River will have 
on its banks great centres of interior trade; and the Mississippi States, 
which are like unto nations in size and resources, will add millions on 
millions to prosperous population, where no foreign enemy can invade, 
where no domestic traitor can distract, and where political union is 
political life everlasting. There will be more millions of inhabitants 
in the Mississippi basin than any nation of the earth now contains, 
not between the Indus River and the Yellow Sea. 

Among genuine political economists, the housewife, who, Avith a 
few dollars a week, received out of her husband's earnings, keeps her 
household together, everything neat and tidy in appearance, and sends 
her children to school week-day and Sunday,, is supreme over specu- 
lators in theories, inflationists who collapse credit, and jugglers who 
abuse charters. 

If Stephen Girard and the founder of the Astors could take a 
"bird's-eye" view of New York and Philadelphia, what estimate 
would they put on the bonus element in railway finance? 

The oak develops from an acorn through a century of time, whereas, 
after a shower, a mushroom matures in a night: the charter-clad jug- 
gler can chloroform his conscience and magnetize his finger nerves; 
but, though guano will quicken the ground, it will not serve for sun- 
shine to ripen grain fit for harvest; and however fiction may entertain 
its readers, it is base and dishonest to substitute it for truth in book 
accounts, official reports, or anywhere else. 

A province in America is not a political body in embryo, with a 
bead crowned in prospective. The royal toy brought disaster to its 
two temporary wearers south of Texas ; and in the history which 
repeated itself in Mexico is a lesson not to be left out of the calcu- 
lations of any royal sprig or sprout ambitious to wear a crown and 



76 

found a dynasty in North America ; for tlie new world is insulated 
from the old by three thousand miles of Atlantic Ocean, which is a 
ferry for immigration and intertrade, and likewise a barrier to mar- 
plots with political plans and enemies with deadly weapons. The 
immigrant and tourist are welcomed over its waves, and for the pre- 
meditated destroyer of liberty there are greedy monsters in its depths. 

As the branches of a tree converge in its trunk, so the branches of 
the Caucasian race, from the continent and islands of Europe, come 
together in wedlock in the American Union, where those who followed 
since Columbus discovered have peopled a new country and estab- 
lished a new power between two seas, with a dozen doors open to 
Europe for immigration and exportation, and a " golden gate" open 
to Asia for intertrade in commodities of commerce. And if Great 
Britain, as a nation in Europe, would be entente cordiale with the 
United States, it only need first and primarily to leave the Dominion 
of Canada to the option of its indAvellers, each province to determine 
its own future transition to a State of the Union. 

Whilst Great Britain is on this side of the Atlantic, in provinces 
across the American main and islands on its coasts, the United States 
must construe its asseverations of distinguished consideration, and all 
that, with a mental reservation, and not cease to remember that the 
English dictionary is prolific of words which supply diplomacy with a 
vocabulary, and which, in the statutes, are made to mean what the 
judge on the bench says they express, in his opinion. 

Towards the United States. Russia, on the other hand, has never 
shown equivocal friendship, nor been guilty of collusion with an enemy 
in time of war, civil or foreign. And, as a logical sequence, behold 
with what reciprocity and cordiality the United States and Russia 
clasp and shake hands across Behring Strait, from the shores of 
Kamtschatka and Alaska ! 

In the suppression of the mutiny and attempted revolution in India 
in 1857, a movement inspired by love of country. Great Britain 
transported the King of Delhi to where he soon died, and killed his 
son and grandson, and so extinguished the royal line of legitimate 
successors of the great Moguls; for the King of Delhi was the head 
of the Mogul empire and a potentate of ancient lineage and illustrious 
rank among Hindoos and Mussulmans. But in British eyes it was a 
crime to be a native legitimist in Hindostan ; and because the King 
of Delhi was the descendant of the Mogul emperors who had ruled 
over a vast empire before India was distracted into petty sovereignties, 
therefore the King of Delhi was considered dangerous to British 
supremacy in India, and so the King of Delhi was doomed to trans- 
portation and inevitable death, and his son and grandson were deprived 



77 

of life in opposition to a divine commandment and in mockery of 
manhood justice ; and this satanic cruelty was practiced so that there 
should be no legal representative alive in Hindostan to reign over the 
Mogul empire revived, in case the natives of India should unite in 
an effort to expel their foreign oppressors and reestablish home rule. 
In other words, the royal line of Delhi was exlterminated to prevent 
the restoration of a time-honored Mogul resime in India, adverse to 
British rule. And Rajahs, Khans, and other native dignitaries were 
hanged in 1857, for political reasons, by the British in India, where 
the " king; of beasts " is considerate and merciful to other animals of 
inferior capabilities for defence, contrasted with the satraps of the 
nation that carries the lion on its coat of arms, and makes " British 
interests" a justification of conquest for trade and a plea for acquisi- 
tion of territory for colonial empire around the globe ; especially in 
places where subjugation is practicable through diplomacy and subsidy, 
where spoliation is profitable, and uncivilized population is defenceless 
against treaty translations and modern guns. 

In antiquity of civilization Hindostan long antedates Great Britain ; 
and the old plea of the Christianity of Great Britain is no longer 
available, since its intrigue against the San Stefano treaty to prolong 
the stay of the Turk in Europe, and its acceptance of Cyprus Island 
as subsidy for a defensive alliance with the Mahometan power that 
centuries ago crossed over from Asia to Europe and waged war against 
the Christian nations to exterminate the Christian religion. Except 
for the interference of Great Britain, the Turk would have been 
scourged out of Europe, for Austria, without British cooperation, 
was impotent to act against Russia. And so Austria and Great 
Britain, both jealous of Russia, and both greedy for spoils, conspired 
against the Christians in European Turkey, for their own mutual 
aggrandizement. And now, with the San Stefano treaty between 
Russia and Turkey, the Berlin Congress of the seven powers, and the 
defensive alliance between Great Britain and Turkey, known to man- 
kind of all religions, the hypocrisy and selfishness of Great Britain 
are of record in evidence that wmU endure in history to confront pro- 
fessions contrary to acts. Review Lord Beaconsfield, the British 
hero in these diplomatic exploits, and wherein is there proof of 
sincerity, truthfulness, or statesmanship, that will stand the test of 
honest criticism, in his sharp practice, which must not be confounded 
with policy farsighted? 

Considered as a finality for Europe, in the interests of peace, the 
Berlin Congress was a failure, because it settled only a few of the 
minor and adjourned most of the main issues of the questions it was 
called together to discuss, arbitrate and solve, for a time to be measured 



78 

# 

not by days but by years. But before the ambassadors had been 
absent a month from Berlin, behold Austria meeting with resistance, 
and made to pay with the blood of its soldiery for its trespass in 
Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

The Berlin Congress partitioned two provinces of Turkey to Austria, 
a non-combatant in the war between Russia and Turkey ; but when 
Austria marched into the territory allotted to it as its prize for co- 
operation with Great Britain, first against Russia in the Bulgaria of 
the San Stefuno treaty, and last against Turkey in Bosnia and Her- 
zegovina, then the people portioned off made defensive war against 
invasion, and Austrian prestige lost the shine put on it at Berlin 
with a British brush. Austria can only rule where she can conquer. 
For preserving it from dismemberment in 1849, Austria in 1878 
repaid Russia with ingratitude. But Servia is an independent nation, 
and Hungary may yet regain its independence of Austria. There 
remains much for diplomacy and the sword to do in the basin of the 
Danube River and south of the Balkan Mountains. 

Since Russia obtained a frontier on the Black Sea at the Knieper 
in 1774, that power, previously bounded by the Caspian and the 
Baltic, has made one acquisition after another along the Black Sea 
shores in Europe and Asia, till now its entire northern and eastern 
coasts and parts of its western and southern coasts belong to Russia, 
which has regained Bessarabia and added Batoum to its harbors and 
Kars to its strongholds. Nor can nor will Russia cease to acquire ter- 
ritory or influence on the Black Sea, till it shall have acquired ground 
essential for the protection of its commerce in the free navigation of 
the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles to the JEgean Sea via Constanti- 
nople, as the United States enjoy between the Mississippi River 
system and the Gulf of Mexico via New Orleans. True, wars have 
procrastinated Russia's progress, but meanwhile Russia has expanded 
and developed into a colossal power that will not be content nor satis- 
fied until the straits between Europe and Asia, which the Turks have 
too long straddled, are open to its ships, and it can protect its com- 
merce to the Mediterranean Sea. 

It would not be tolerated in Denmark to blockade or embargo the 
sound or belt to the Baltic ; nor in Great Britain to blockade or em- 
bargo the Strait of Gibraltar nor the English Channel. And a 
frontage on the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean 
is as essential to Russia as Florida to the United States, Dover to 
England, Calais to France. 

England covets Egypt and the Euphrates valley, because they 
contain routes to India from the Mediterranean, and acquired Cyprus 
Island because of its strategic significance as a naval station, with 



79 

reference to the Suez Canal and Euphrates railway routes to India ; 
and at the same time and with the same breath cants about Russian 
aggression, and strives to keep that power out of Constantinople. 
The words "British interests" would serve the devil for a short 
motto in pandemonium, as it does for politicians in London, who barter 
away the Christian Church in Turkey to save the British dollar in 
India and elsewhere. Great is the dollar in Britain. 

For whatever the United States may deem necessary of enactment 
and execution to prevent the establishment of dynastic government in 
Canada, it has the supreme and all-sufficient law of self-preservation, 
additional to precedents in the practice of Great Britain where it 
considered its interests prospectively involved. And if British fleets 
in past times had terrors to nations with small navies and imperfect 
defences, in present time the British iron-clad is impotent to bulldoze 
the torpedo, which is as destructive to an iron-clad ship of war as to 
a wooden target. In the account between the Russian torpedo and 
the Turkish iron-clad the credit balance is largely in favor of the tor- 
pedo. The role of the iron-clad is rather to menace with demonstra- 
tions than attack with projectiles ; for the torpedo charged to explode 
is more to be dreaded than a floating battery in an iron-clad ship, 
which is vulnerable in the same proportion that it was claimed to be 
invulnerable. A weather vane is put up to point to the wind and 
turn when the wind changes ; and public opinion weighs with weights 
in a true balance and turns on a pivot in gravity's centre. Hence, 
on examination it is easy to ascertain which way the wind blows, and 
in what direction public opinion tends. Concealment of the truth is 
impossible where discussion winnows assertions from facts. That the 
iron-clad has disappointed expectation in Europe is a truth patent to 
everybody and a special grief to Englishmen, because there can be no 
naval supremacy whilst the torpedo, if not paramount in the waters, is 
a terror to iron-clads. And to show how the British navy chicaned 
at Copenhagen in 1801, at Algiers in 1816, and at Acre in 1840, the 
following extract is copied from page 271 of Col. J. P. Chesney's 
" Russo-Turkish campaigns of 1828 and 1829," published in 1854, 
in the beginning of the war against Russia by France, Great Britain, 
and Sardinia, as allies of Turkey, four powers against one ; a war in 
which the British, after more than one trial, did not take the Redan, 
though the French did take the Malakhoff"; whereupon the Russians 
retired to the north forts of Sebastopol and were not driven thence 
by the besieging allies. 

Col. Chesney, R. A., D. C. L., F. R. S., says : 

"It is true that three remarkable instances have occurred in modern 
times, which may seem to favor the superiority of ships over stone 



<S0 

walls. TThese are Copenhagen, Algiers and Acre. In the first case, 
it is understood that Nelson was only relieved from a critical situation 
by sending a letter on shore, which caused tlie batteries of Copenhagen 
to cease firing against the fleet. 

" In the second instance, the attack on Algiers was made during 
a state of peace. We know that after our fleet had entered the har- 
bor, not in line of battle, but almost ship by ship, and, consequently, 
greatly exposed to the garrison, the Queen Charlotte, by the advice 
of an engineer officer. Sir William Ried, K. C. B., now the distin- 
guished Governor of Malta, was placed with her broadside on the 
flank of the grand or mole battery. The rest of the fleet had also 
taken up advantageous positions without a shot being fired by the 
garrison, until Lord Exmouth waved his hat as the signal for the 
fleet to open its fire simultaneously. 

" In the third case, that of Acre, the fleet was also allowed to take 
up positions Avhich had been previously arranged, without any oppo- 
sition. Buoys had even been placed beforehand, and what had been 
a state of peace up to that moment was only broken by the opening 
of a terrific fire of shells and shot, when everything w'as ready; — at 
least on our side." 

British duplicity, however, practiced in its naval tactics at Copen- 
hagen, Algiers and Acre, as described by a competent British military 
authority, a colonel in the Royal Artillery, did not avail at Sebas- 
topol, the siege of which was commenced by a joint attack of the 
allied fleets and forces. October 17, 1854, which was unsuccessful; 
nor was the Malakhoff" taken by the French till September 8, 1855, 
when the allies entered that portion of Sebastopol left in ruins by 
the retiring Russians. Neither did the Baltic fleet, under Sir C. 
Napier, venture to attack Cronstadt, which defends St. Petersburg, 
in the Russo-Turkish-French-British-Sardinian war of 1853-185G, 
a war which was waged to wrest from Russia the Crimea and other 
ground, but which ended leaving Russia intact, save that its Bessara- 
bian corner was cut off", till it was retroceded by the San Stefano 
treaty, a retrocession which the Congress of Berlin confirmed. The 
Crimean war added no prestige to Russia's allied enemies. To Great 
Britain it was a loss of prestige. The war of 1877-1878, ended by 
the treaty of San Stefano, between Russia and Turkey, conferred a 
lustre on Russia's arms which the Congress of Berlin did not dim nor 
eclipse with its own performances. 



SI 



CHAPTER IX. 

On the 29tli July, 1878, it was officially announced, in London, 
that the Marquis of Lome, son-in-law of Queen Victoria, had been 
appointed Governor-General of the Dominion of Canada, successor to 
Lord Dufferin. The Marquis of Lome, husband of the Princess Louise, 
is the eldest son of the Duke of Argyll. He was born August 6, 1845, 
and was married March 21, 1871. The Princess Louise, the sixth of 
the nine children of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, was born 
March 18, 1848. The Marquis of Lome, whose mission it is to vivi- 
sect the Dominion of Canada with royal blood, and attempt the task 
of founding a dynasty in the shadow of the tree of liberty, in soil 
near its roots, which are sound like its branches, is a member of Par- 
liament from the county of Argyll, Scotland. The county of Argyll 
is positively liberal in its politics, and the Marquis of Lome, who 
comes to America probably to propagate royalty in disguise, perchance 
in expectation of a propitious season to declare a kingdom, professed 
liberal sentiments when he was elected to Parliament ; but after his 
marriage to a daughter of the Queen, whereby the subject was flattered 
with a condescension singular in the sovereign, he acted with the 
Tories as unconditionally as if he had never given a pledge to his 
Liberal constituency in Argyll. The Marquis, therefore, is a British 
diplomatist, who, when he says one thing, perhaps means another. 
But, in America, the art of government is open to universal study ; 
and the intelliirent elector who knows how to wield the ballot and to 
strike with it, contemplates a royalist with as little awe as a learned 
physician looks on the medicine man of an Indian tribe. In repub- 
lican eyes king-craft is a transparent sham, and a royal court is but 
a theatre with a stage and a stock company. For star actors in polit- 
ical parts do we not search among distinguished ministers who served 
crowned heads ? Is not Shakspeare immortal in the realm of mind 
beyond the royal characters depicted in his plays ? Does not revolu- 
tion uproot a dynasty as a tornado uproots a tree ? And where the 
tree stood before the storm destroyed it, does not the ploughman make 
a furrow and plant seed to utilize the ground, and so turn a visitation 
in wind to advantage in agriculture ? Is not a fire in a city a bless- 
ing in flame when a site is cleared for needed improvements not 
otherwise attainable, because of opposition against tearing down old 
structures, superseded and depreciated ? Forces in nature are not 
diminished because now and then a storm makes a commotion in the 
air, and there is destruction on land and sea. After a thunder-storm 
the atmosphere is more exhilarating ; and after a plot against nation- 




82 

• 

ality and free government is exploded, the political sky of a progress- 
ive people resumes its normal azure hue. The sky of Mexico was 
twice overcast with cloud, but it is a third time cerulean, if not serene. 
The Republic in France was twice supplanted, but now France is a 
Republic for the third time, watchful and determined not to be again 
betrayed in the interest of legitimacy, dynasty or empire, three forms 
of personal government antagonistic to republicanism, because birth- 
right succession to a sceptre is contrary to the right of the governed 
to choose the chief of the government. 

The masses, in America, understand their interests, political, educa- 
tional, religious and pecuniary, too well, and comprehend the situation 
and its surroundings too clearly, to tolerate a kingdom or an empire 
in North America, or permit a plotting power in Europe to intrigue 
against the annexation of free States to the American Union ; a cen- 
tury plant, which, on its hundredth anniversary, in 1876, blossomed in 
Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, with thirty-eight States, and bore eleven 
territorial buds on its branches. Royalty is a vine which exhales a 
poison, deadly where it causes sleep, shelters parasites where it creeps 
and covers, and kills the tree it girdles and overgrows, as the stumps 
of punk fungus, only fit for tinder, in the genealogical park testify. 
In truth, it was an error to import the English sparrow into the 
United States, where it is out of place among singing birds, that 
make the country and the town vocal with native songs. The British 
tramp, with wings, has a voracity in disproportion to its size. And 
among more musical American birds in prettier plumage, the sparrow 
is the equivalent of the communist in the French republic, and is an 
importation to the United States "not fit to be made." 

American citizens who study the political weather and consult prob- 
abilities in British politics, will not fraternize with title bearers im- 
ported into Canada to act automatic parts in a game of dynastic chess 
played in London against free institutions in America. Let exhibi- 
tions of loyalty to royalty come from the St. George societies, whose 
members are imbued with British ideas in fast colors, visible through 
the ink of a naturalization certificate ! 

The worthy Princess Louise, now the Marchioness of Lome, is not 
more worthy than Nellie Grant, now Mrs. Sartoris. And did not 
Harriet Lane, now Mrs. Johnson, do the honors of the White House, 
in Washington, with as much grace and dignity as any princess in her 
appropriate part in Windsor Castle ? The law of quality which per- 
vades American oysters and eggs, and causes their classification into 
"good" and "bad," also pervades the titled and untitled ranks in 
Europe, where those who pass for "commons" show as large a per- 
centage of "good" as the so-called nobility. 



83 

Is a princess lovelier than another lady in a bathing-suit, in the 
breakers at Cape May and Rockaway ? And as from the time of 
Eve's first pregnancy nature has used but one common mould for the 
reproduction of the human species, it follows that the process of mater- 
nity is the same everywhere, and that the assumptions of superiority 
in birth — and a birth is the delivery of a life to the world by a 
matrix of single standard established by nature in universal law — 
are unfounded in physiology and false in everything ; also, that dis- 
tinctions and discriminations made to the advantage of titled and the 
disadvantage of untitled persons are abuses in human government 
which will not be permitted in North America, where there is no road 
open for royalty to travel in safety to a throne; and Avhere, moreover, 
two royal roads commenced in Mexico both led to places of execution. 

"The Bourbons learn nothing and forget nothing." Are all 
dynastic families like the Bourbons ? And is not a minister of state 
who cannot discern that dynastic government is destined to perish 
like other impostures of the past based on superstition, which is 
everywhere disappearing from political horizons, unfit for office in 
these latter advanced days ? Animal nature, nowhere perfect, may be 
found as near perfection where all are citizens as where titles and 
honors are hereditary and succession is independent of merit. No, 
no; human nature is not compounded like bronze preparatory to 
casting a statue in a mould, nor like metal in a bell, impregnated 
with silver to soften its sound. Greater monsters or worse men 
never lived on the earth than some of the occupants of the throne of 
England. And criminal calendars show that a prince can be as 
wicked as a peasant. Away then with the arrogance that hereditary 
office exalts human nature, which, where it attains to highest exalta- 
tion in public and private life, is always founded on manhood and 
womanhood, worth and virtue. The citizen reserves his veneration 
and his adoration for the one universal God, and makes allotment of 
his respect and admiration according to his understanding, experience 
and observation, with mental impartiality and without preference, 
prejudice, or bias. 

The British political system, which perpetuates power in a priv- 
ileged class, and tolerates the laws of primogeniture and entail, pos- 
itive drawbacks to reform, has made London a mammoth and masto- 
don city, has made the dozen millionaires and the million companions 
of poverty "acquainted with grief." 

The spectacle of honor in plumes and ribbons and decorations on 
breasts and shoulders ennobled by partial law, not by impartial jus- 
tice and honest effort, does not fill the requirements of manhood nor 
satisfy the educated mind, quick to discern and able to weigii, meas- 
ure and appreciate. The smell of food flavored for the palace does 



84 

• 

not appease the hunger of the multitude in hovels, for the stomach is 
sensitive and the body must have nourishment. To provide things 
to eat and to wear is a common duty, for food and clothing are com- 
mon necessaries ; and hence opportunities for sustentation and better- 
ment ought to be open to everybody. 

Wide, indeed, is the difference between a citizen and a subject, a 
republic in the hands of republican citizens and a monarchy admin- 
istered by a dynasty, with an army to enforce its decrees ; particu- 
larly to the masses who work with brain and muscle, operate with 
mind on matter, and among whom are a considerable proportion who 
have ideas to embody in practical use and aspirations to realize, through 
rewards in sight of manly ambition and within reach of honest effort. 

The annual grants received by the Queen of Great Britain and 
Ireland and the members of her family amount to a very large sum, 
about three million dollars, for the royal household of Great Britain 
is a numerous family, which derives its main consideration not from 
services rendered to the kingdom since the House of Hanover ob- 
tained the succession through George I., but from the circumstance 
that it supplies the sovereign on the throne and reigns by authority 
of law, without contest — a great matter — and with the sanction of 
Parliament, the Lords and Commons. 

The House of Hanover began its reign with George I., 1714, when 
the American colonies were in the infancy of development ; but neither 
of the four Georges, who reigned jointly one hundred and six years, 
nor William IV., who died June 20, 1837, was more than an ordinary 
mortal, considered apart from the crown, which invests its wearer 
with official patronage and royal prerogatives and rights. 

Queen Victoria, distinguished for her domestic virtues and motherly 
merits, and for the higher standard established in her court, and who 
personally commands the respect and the affectionate good-will of the 
people of the United States, was crowned at Westminster June 28, 
1838, Queen Victoria, only daughter of the Duke of Kent, was 
born May 24, 1819; was married to her cousin. Prince Albert of 
Saxe-Coburg, February 10, 1840 ; Prince Albert died December 14, 
1861, lamented and mourned. As the issue of woman born into the 
world with life is nowhere exempted from death, the common penalty 
imposed by nature, there is a democratic condition in the child born 
naked into the world, in helplessness and dependence, and a demo- 
cratic condition in the hereditary potentate when death levels him 
down on his back to die like his subject, and mingle his dust with 
universal humanity in common mother earth. All men, therefore, 
are born democrats and die democrats, wherefore democracy, primitive 
and pure in nature, where party name cannot corrupt, is the normal 
condition of the beginning and ending of man's sojourn in the society 



85 

to "which he owes service, in the years of his responsibility between 
youth and age, Avhen the vigor of manhood, which includes all of life 
but its ends, fits him for duty. The superiority claimed for royalty is 
a mockery of spirituality with materialism. Did not the Son of God 
say, " My kingdom is not of this world" ? It was the mission of Jesus 
Christ to redeem the world from the penalty of its sin and assure to 
mankind a possible higher life in a spiritual sphere, where material 
matters cannot be perverted to confound the masses by arch diplo- 
matists, lawyers, and mercenaries ; such as abound in the old world 
at this present juncture of abrasion among the branches of the race 
founded by Adam, saved from drowning by Noah, and made progres- 
sive by the inspired words of the Saviour, who was crucified because 
he preached against temporal kingdom. Love of splendor was the 
ruin of the Jews, who loved glitter better than God. And wherein is 
London better than Jerusalem, for does not London covet empire and 
lust for conquest ? 

In proportion as intelligence is spread among the people, crowns 
will be shorn of their prerogatives, which in most cases are usurpa- 
tions, and written constitutions will restrict incumbents of office within 
limits. Contrast the caskets which contain the dust of departed kings 
who reigned by dynastic birthright, with the slab that covers the grave 
of a patriot, author, discoverer, or inventor, conspicuous in human annals. 

Go into Westminster Abbey, and observe how visitors search in the 
Poet's Corner for names perennial in the reader's mind and immortal 
in the world of letters. Is not England more indebted to ministers 
of state than to its kings and queens ? Is it not notorious that her 
Majesty's ministers managed the Crown, manipulated the Porte, and 
ignored the Houses of Parliament (albeit the Commons ought and 
might exercise a controlling influence in the realm), in the negotiation 
and ratification of the Treaty of Defensive Alliance with Turkey, 
signed June 4, 1878, and amended July 1, twenty-six days thereafter? 
Why, then, as the Crown of England is cast in a subordinate part in 
the practice of England, where the ministry usurps the functions of 
government in making treaties with foreign powers, wherein prospective 
war is made probable, are the princes and princesses of the House of 
Hanover, a German graft, exalted in official and social honors over 
the sons and daughters of Englishmen, distinguished for service to 
their country ? 

Contemplate the Commonwealth under Cromwell, as a power among 
nations, with the monarchy under Charles 11. and his successors ! 
Princes and princesses are men and women born in lawful wedlock, 
like citizens and subjects, notlimg more. Nor does their so-called 
royal birth entitle them to consideration, social or political, over the 
sons and dausihters of the President or Prcsidentess in Washinn;ton. 



86 

In the United States the President relapses into the citizen, and his 
children blend in the society of the common country, as raindrops 
disappear in a river. And so with prince and princess, husband and 
wife, who come over from Europe to hold office in Canada. The 
Governor-General and his wife are official characters, entitled to the 
consideration awarded to unexceptionable persons in distinguishing 
office. And if the Duke of Argyll so administers his office as to win 
admiration of his modesty and respect for his talents, he will earn a 
name that will emit a lustre which cannot be borrowed from a title. 

The American Union has developed very many distinguished men, 
who exalted the official rank in which they served their country, and 
whose names fill the offices they held with honorable associations. 
But because an American citizen is made a president, a general, 
senator, or ambassador, to perform a duty for a compensation, with 
opportunity to stimulate the official to win fame and deserve gratitude, 
success under such circumstances is not a reason for a grant or inher- 
itance to his children ; for the citizen is under obligation to discharge 
his duty, and for simply doing his duty no one is entitled to extra 
praise ; although for service measured by merit, the American people are 
prone and prompt to award praise, in ways more substantial than words. 

The moon has no atmosphere, and consequently shines without a 
mist. The American citizen has no title, and is judged on his charac- 
ter and record. A title is a veil and so is a cloud ; but a veil like a 
cloud is only a temporary obscuration, for a cloud will pass away on 
the wind and a veil is a penetrable disguise to penetrating eyes. Hence 
the title-wearer, like the weather overhead, must withstand observa- 
tion and criticism. Like the stars in space, officials in titles must 
undergo scrutiny through the telescope, for the constituent is an 
astronomer given to exact calculation. 

An envelope is not a letter. In a republic a title is no more than 
a counterfeit bank note. And if Great Britain would capitalize its 
aristocracy at the par of its self-estimated value and then appraise it 
at what it is worth to the realm, in the opinion of experts appointed 
to detect and expose fraud, it would be shown that the Turkish loan 
is not the largest nominal asset of Great Britain. 

The Marquis of Lome, the husband of the Princess Louise and 
son-in-law of the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and Empress 
of India, as supplemented by Lord Beaconsfield, is Governor-General 
of the Dominion of Canada, in the service of a foreign country with 
which the nation of the United States has great and grave reasons 
for dissatisfaction and displeasure ; nor will these reasons cease to 
acquire force from current facts, till the British government discon- 
tinues its plots in America, where its designs are as intelligible as if 
printed in its London programme. 



INDEX 



Acre, British Fleet at, 

Alaska, 

Algiers, British Fleet at, 

America, no Dynasty in, . 

Ammon, R. A., Brakeman at Pittsbur 

Area of the American Union, 

Austria, 

Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, 

Berlin, Congress of, 

Black Sea once a Turkish Lake, 

Boundary Line, 

British Columbia, 

British Navy at Copenhagen, Algiers 

Buffalo, City of, 

Canada, Dominion of, 

Canada, Governor-General of, 

Canada Grand Trunk Railway, 

Canada Pacific Railway, 

Cartier, Jacques, 

Chicago, 

Citizens and Subjects, 

Delhi Dynasty exterminated, 
Divine Right of Kings, Fiction of. 
Dynasty, not in North America, 

England, .... 
English Tactics in America, . 
Erie Canal, 

Fiction of Divine Right of Kings, 

Florida, . ■ . 

Foreign Trade of the United States, 

Fort Bourbon, afterwards York Fort 

France, 

Germany, .... 
Grant, General U. S., . 
Great Britain, . . . 

Gulf of Mexico, 

Halifax Fishery Award, 
House of Hanover, 
Hudson Bay, 
Hudson Bay. Company, 

Indelible Names, . 

India, Suppression of Mutiny in, 

Ireland, population of, 

Italy, .... 





Page 




. • . . . 80 




. 30, 33, 39, 62, 76 




80 




. 21, 64, 75 


rgh, 


. . . . 52 




. 20 




. 9, 11, 44, 46, 51, 67, 77 




6 




. 9, 40, 47, 50, 67, 77 




11, 46, 78 




. 10, 33, 37 




5, 14, 21, 27 


and Acre, . 


. 79 




. 12, 23 




3, 6, 13, 23, 27, 33, 66 




81 




. 38 




5, 24, 27, 37 




5 




24, 38, 75 




7, 15, 28, 62, 66, 70, 82 




16 




. 62 




7,21,25,28,46,63,66,75 




48, 67, 69, 78 




60 




16, 23 




62 




. 33 




71, 72 




6 




8, 12, 32, 37, 42, 46, 50, 53 




11, 51, 63, 65 




. 39, 52 




16, 35, 39, 41, 48, 58 




. - 43 




. 40 




84 




5, 12, 35, 39 




. 12, 37 




53, 67 




. 41, 76 




. 58 




11, 44, 50 



88 



Lake Erie, ..... 

Lake Superioi-, .... 
Lake Traverse, ..... 
Lake Winnipeg, .... 
London, . . . . 

Louisiana, .... 

Maine, ...... 

Malakhoff and Redan at Sebastopol, 
Manitoba, ..... 

Mexico, ..... 

Middle Sea, ..... 

Minnesota, .... 

Minnesota River Valley, 

Mississippi, Basin of the. 

Mutiny in India, . ... 

Nelson River, .... 

New Boundary between Manitoba and Ontario, 
New Brunswick and Maine, 
New York City, .... 

Nova Scotia and Massachusetts, 

Ontario, Province of, . . . 

Original Thirteen States, . 

Pennsylvania Railroad, 

Philadelphia, .... 

Philadelphia Soldiers at Pittsburgh, . 

Pittsburgh, .... 

Population, ..... 

Population, Nativities of, . 

Public Opinion the paramount power, 

Railroad Distances, 

Railway Expansion in six years, 

Red River of the North, 

Republic of France, .... 

Revulsion of 1873, some of the Causes of, 

Riot not Insurrection, .... 

Russia, ..... 

Saint Paul, ..... 

San Juan Island Arbitration, 

Serlick Settlement, .... 

Shoes not flanged in America, 

Spain, ...... 

St. Lawrence River, 

St. Louis, ..... 

Texas, ..... 

Thirteen Original States, 

Trade of the United States, 

Transvaal Republic, .... 

Traverse Lake Summit, 

Turkey, ..... 

United States, .... 

Vienna, Congress of, . 



Washington Territory, .... 
Washington Treaty of 1871, . 

West, the, bound by Hudson Bay and Gulf of Mexico, 
Western States, when admitted into the Union, 
Western Territories, when organized, 









Pa(;i'. 








16, 22 








G, 23, 34 








. 17, 22 




• '4, 


17, 


22, 32, 39 
13, 59, 74 






11, 


26, 32, 62 

15 

. 80 






6, 


26, 33, 68 




• 


4, 


21, 64, 75 

27, 36, 39 

6, 20, 22 

. 17, 22 

19, 69 

76 

. 26 
33 

. 15 

. 59, 69 

. 15 

33 

36, 62 

6 

. 69 

55 

. 55 

6, 58, 64 

. 65 

25 

. 24 

73 

17, 23, 39 




.8, 


12, 


45, 53, 63 

. 72 
56 




. "9, 


42, 


47, 50, 78 

. 18, 23 

. 40 

5, 37 

7 

. 44, 51 

14, 24, 43 

44 

20, 31 

. 36, 62 

71, 72 

62 

. 17 




9, 


45, 


50, 67, 78 


10, 


13, 19, 


39, 


51, 65, 86 




• 


• 


. 10, 40 

5, 21 

. 39, 59 

18, 35 

19 

. 20 



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